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Felix Pawlowski, teacher, pioneer aircraft designer, and philosopher. The Polish and Russian universities had been into aviation early and were in the forefront of aeronautical knowledge at that time. Pawlowski, a Pole, had worked in Russia with Igor Sikorsky on the world’s first four-engine airplane in 1913. He had been trained by Professor Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Paris tower, and worked with him on a wind tunnel. Professor Pawlowski wasresponsible for bringing the first wind tunnel and the first aeronautical engineering curriculum to the University of Michigan.
    He taught my first course in aerodynamics and helped me get the first engineering jobs that would pay my way through school. He, like some of the other professors, had contracts outside the college. In the wind tunnel, I worked for him on design of the Union Pacific streamlined train, on a smoke-removal project for the city of Chicago, and on one of the very early proposals for generating energy with a wind machine.
    The professors were broadminded people, with interests and contacts outside the university. They took a personal as well as professional interest in their students. One day Professor Pawlowski taught me an important lesson in keeping an open mind. He took me down to a bank vault where he had some wax impressions of hands, “spirit” hands, he had from a seance. They were entwined in a manner that could not be explained. This eminent scientist was willing to consider their validity. He wanted me to learn to keep an open mind.
    “Don’t automatically write anything off,” he said. “Anything.” I’ve remembered that.
    Professor Edward A. Stalker, author of a basic text on aerodynamics and an outstanding mathematician, was head of the aeronautical department. He, himself, not some registrar, helped me plan my course of study.
    After I had shown enough academic progress he selected me as student assistant and I was able to earn enough money to quit the lowly job in the fraternity kitchen.
    As head of the aeronautical engineering department, Professor Stalker operated the wind tunnel and got me involved in wind-tunnel testing.
    One day I asked Professor Stalker, “Could I rent the wind tunnel when it’s not needed by the university and get some jobs on my own?”
    “Sure,” he said.
    So for $35 a day, plus the power charges, my best friend in college, Don Palmer, and I became part-time proprietors of theUniversity of Michigan wind tunnel. The money didn’t mean anything to the university; renting the tunnel afforded them a chance to see what the students could do.
    Immediately, I approached the Studebaker Motor Company. It was obvious that the wind tunnel could be very useful in designing streamlined automobiles. We got an assignment to test the Pierce Silver Arrow, which was to become one of the early “totally-streamlined” cars. We knew all the tricks on how to reduce drag caused by air resistance. We found, for instance, that the big ugly headlamps on Studebaker cars were eating up 16 percent of the power the engine developed at 65 miles an hour. We managed to get them shaped into the fenders. We worked on a lot of other problems and ran many, many tests.
    So we worked not only for Professors Pawlowski and Stalker but for ourselves. Tutoring in calculus also brought me $7.50 an hour.
    Some of the courses, seemingly not much related to aircraft, turned out to be especially useful to me later.
    Mechanical engineering, for example. For our final examination, we students had to make a heat balance evaluation of the university’s power plant, a large steam facility with four big boilers, that provided not only heat but power. I, an aeronautical engineer, was put in charge of the other mechanical engineers for the three-day continuous test, measuring coal input and then accounting for all the energy through the entire process down to the ashes. It was a valuable lesson in energy balance.
    Professor O. W. Boston was a pioneer