Memorial Service

Memorial Service

Here is the other side of the program for Dad's memorial service.  

Today we had a beautiful memorial service for my dad.  Here is one side of the program:

Memorial Service

Robert Gault moved to Friends House, a lovely Quaker Retirement Community in Sandy Spring Maryland in April, 2012.  It was there that he spent the last several months of his life, walking the beautiful grounds, picking strawberries and salad greens from the gardens, singing with the Friends House Choir, playing his guitar and reading physics books from the 1940s.  

He was a renaissance man, interested in everything, curious about how everything works, and willing to take anything apart to figure that out. He was also an artist, recording in pen and ink drawings his travels and his interests. Many of those drawings surrounded him in his apartment at Friends House.  

He and his wife of 28 years, Joanie Mok Gault of Silver Spring MD, raised 3 children while they both worked and traveled the world.  Robert taught C++ Computer Language at Howard University and managed the computer lab.  He also coached the Computer Programing Team in their competitions throughout the country. Joanie worked at the NIH for her entire career.  Their travels often took them to China, Joanie's birthplace.  

Robert was formerly married to Joan Carey, with whom he raised 6 children, Netta, John, Mary, Jim, Bill and Rob. The following story was written by Robert Gault, with minor edits by his daughter, Mary. It begins when he was 21 years old.  His earlier history will be added at a later time.

I was in the US Army Signal Corps at the Narsarssauk Army Air Corps base near the Southern tip of Greenland.  Subsequently, I applied for, and was accepted at Officer Candidate School at Fort Monmouth, NJ.  Soon after I arrived at Ft. Monmouth, World War II ended.  I requested discharge, and was released from the OCS and transferred to the Signal Corps Board.  This was an organization that tested newly designed equipment for the Signal Corps. 

My new job required me to work with a team that met every morning to take equipment to be field tested in various locations in NJ.  The equipment would be loaded in a shielded 6x6 truck that would be driven by the team to the test site. One day I received word that my brother Bill had returned with the US Air Force from Europe and was now stationed right nearby in Raritan, NJ.  I wanted to visit him, but I had no car, and no way to get there.  I asked around if anyone knew of one I might borrow.  I heard that one of the secretaries at Ft. Monmouth owned a 1933 Pontiac 8 sedan.  

There was a beautiful, tall young woman I had seen strolling past the windows of the lab where I worked. It turned out that the owner of the Pontiac and this young woman were one in the same person, Joan Carey.  I summoned the nerve to ask her to loan me her car. She agreed.  I went to visit my brother, and on my way home, I stopped at a florist and bought a gardenia, which I affixed to the steering wheel of her car when I returned it to its parking spot.

The next day, Joan  came to the lab and thanked me for the flower. We chatted for awhile, then I asked her out for a date. We decided to go horseback riding the following Saturday.  I used to ride large draft horses at my family's farm in Cheboygan, Michigan, but that did not prepare me for the cantankerous horse I was given to ride that day.  This horse would not respond to any of my commands, and returned to the barn and stayed there no matter what I did. I was very embarrassed, after having implied that I was quite an experienced horseman. I was very surprised when Joan invited me to her home following that first outing.

Joan lived with the Swackhamer family in Middletown, NJ.  There were 3 sons, Jack, Jim, and Egbert who were like brothers to Joan, and their mother, Ruth.  I became a regular visitor to the Swackhamer home, until I was honorably discharged from the Army in 1946, at age 23.  

I returned to my old job as a radio engineer at my home in Detroit, MI.  I worked at the FM radio station W49D, broadcasting from the 34 storey Eaton Tower.  I worked there through the summer of 1946, and on September 7 of that yearJoan Carey and I were married at the Grace Episcopal Church, a few hundred feet from the Swackhamer home.

We honeymooned for a week in Long Branch NJ, then drove the Pontiac (called “George” by Joan and her sister Jean) to Seneca Lake in upstate NY.  We stayed in a cottage for a week at Fir Tree Point, near Watkins Glen.  Joan developed bronchitis and was ordered to bed by her doctor. I spent the week under George, disassembling the drive shaft in an attempt to stop its rather serious vibration at high speeds.  In 1946 new cars were practically unavailable, so we drove George until we bought (thanks to my dad’s generosity) our first British Austin A40 sedan in 1948. 

After our two week honeymoon, we drove to the Detroit suburb of Highland Park, to visit my parents Harry Davidson Gault and Albertina Louisa Schmidt Gault.  We moved to our first apartment in Lansing, on West Michigan Avenue, near the Michigan State Capitol building.

I enrolled in Michigan State College as an Electrical Engineering freshman and got a job tending the transmitter at WKAR, the college FM station.  It was an easy night job, requiring only that I record the transmitter’s frequency and power readings every 30 minutes. For 65 cents per hour, I could do all my homework between readings. Joan worked as a secretary in the department of botany, and moonlighted as a typist for graduate students’ theses.

Later I worked as an engineer for WILS, a new AM station in Lansing.  I also worked on-air in a weekly broadcast at WILS from a restaurant owned by Henry Owens, and was paid with a free meal.  I began bringing my wife with me to the broadcast, and Henry Owens began complaining that he didn’t intend to pay me with two meals.  I don’t recall whether or not that ended the remote pickup job.

Two courses in Electrical Engineering stand out: Surveying and DC Rotating Machinery.  The former required wandering around outside in Michigan’s cold weather.  The latter had us testing giant motors and generators as large as buildings.  The worst part was that we had to document our work in reports that required lettering in India ink on large sheets of drafting paper.  These reports were subject to editing by lab assistant instructors, who scribbled destructively in large scrawls, requiring us to redo the reports.  When I changed my major from Electrical Engineering to Physics I cited the unreasonableness of the EE techs as my reason for transferring.

One day I saw an ad in Broadcasting Magazine seeking a Chief Engineer for a new FM station in Paterson, NJ.  I applied, citing my three years of radio experience in the Signal Corps and broadcasting experience working for W49D (later WLOU), WJLB in Detroit, WKAR in East Lansing and WILS in Lansing.  I was hired, so in August 1947 we move to 93 Orient Way, Rutherford, NJ.  I started working for Ed Twomley, manager of WWDX at the offices of the Passaic Herald-News. 

On August 8, 1948 we became the proud parents of our first child, Netta Louise Gault. We drove to Middletown to show her to Ruth Swackhamer, Joan’s unofficial adoptive mother.

I realized that I didn’t know as much about Radio Engineering as I thought, so we decided to take our small family and return to Michigan State College.  We were lucky enough to be assigned a one-bedroom barracks apartment on campus. 

I got a job working for the John Deere Company, in a hot, sweaty field east of Okemos, repairing defective John Deere corn picking machines.  After 2 dirty, hot weeks, I decided to look for other work. The E. Dan Willis Appliance Store in Okemos was in need of a television repairman.  I bought a Howard Sams book on TV repair and studied it before going to talk to Dan. I was hired, and continued to work for him from 1948 until 1953.  Years later he told me that he knew that I wasn’t experienced in television repair, but he liked my spunk. When I left after 5 years, having never lost one of his tools, he rewarded me with a set of tools that I took with me when I was hired by Bell Labs.

Johnny was born in May of 1950.  He had an engaging smile and was smart and fun to play with.  But when he was unhappy, there was no pacifying him.  He was our one colicky baby.

Mary’s arrival in 1951 was announced well in advance, as Joan’s water broke 3 months early, and she was confined to bed rest until Mary’s premature birth. She was very small, and had to live in an incubator for 3 weeks before we could bring her home. She was a very happy, inquisitive child.  She was also very noisy due to the heavy steel brace between her feet.  She loved to lie on her back in her crib and energetically smash the brace against the wooden panel at the end of the crib.

I completed my BS in Physics in 1951.  I was interviewed by Esso in Chicago, and General Dynamics in Buffalo. Neither company offered me a job.  So I began graduate school to pursue a Masters’s Degree in Physics. In addition to my physics and math classes, I taught scientific level physics classes to recitation sections of undergraduates My thesis was on the Polarization Effects in Optical Diffraction. I often wish I had gone on to get my PhD in Physics so I could have continued as faculty in the Physics department. I received my Master’s degree in Physics in June of 1953.

Bell Laboratories offered me a job in New Jersey, so we packed up the family and moved to a tiny house in Madison NJ, one block from Fairleigh Dickinson University.  We attended St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Madison, and Joan and I participated in many of the social activities associated with the church. We bought an aged upright piano and refinished it. Our fourth child, Jim was born at the Morristown Memorial Hospital.  

My first work assignment at Bell Labs was in the Station Apparatus Department at Murray Hill, NJ.  My half-time assignment was to be a student at what was informally called Kelly College (named for Mervin J. Kelly, president of Bell Labs) in Manhattan.  Three days a week I commuted  from Madison NJ on the Delaware Lackawanna and Western Railroad to Hoboken, hopped on the Christopher Street Ferry to get a breath of fresh air as we crossed the Hudson River to Bell Labs Kelly College on West Street in lower Manhattan.

In 1955 we bought a home in Berkeley Heights NJ, .5 miles from Bell Labs Murray Hill office.  I usually walked or biked to work. Our fifth child, Bill was born in 1956 at Overlook Hospital, Summit, NJ.  

In the summertime there were neighborhood block parties; at Christmas there was caroling, with rehearsals held at our home, with our refinished piano.  I joined the Bell Labs Chorus, and  joined a Barbershop quartet that also practiced in our home.  

In the evenings we took classes:  I studied Russian, Joan studied French. In the summers we rented a cottage at Seneca Lake’s Fir Tree Point.  We all learned to sail with K boats, and later our Sunfish. At our last visit, in the summer of 1961, I received a call from my boss, Ralph Johnson, offering me a promotion to be the supervisor of the Bell Labs Point Mugu, CA field station.  Joan and I discussed it and I decided to accept the job, so we moved to a rented home in the middle of an avocado orchard in Camarillo, CA. Amazingly, Joan’s only sister Jean also lived in Camarillo, so they were able to spend some time together there.  

We took trips to Yosemite, Disneyland, San Diego, and Death Valley in our newly-acquired VW bug.  The perfect car for a family of 7.  

The children found that right down the hill from our home was a quarter-horse ranch that provided them hours of entertainment after school and on weekends.  They convinced me to move the family to a big old house on that ranch, where we watched quarter horses being raised and trained for one wonderful summer. There was a huge, ancient pepper tree in front of the house, where I hung a thick rope for the greatest rope swing the kids had ever seen.

We were notified that the Point Mugu Station would be closed, and I was transferred to the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico.  We bought a home in Las Cruces.  In October of 1964 our 6th child, Rob, was born.  We remained in Las Cruces for 5 years until 1968, when we moved back to Basking Ridge NJ, where I began a job at Bell Labs in Whippany.