Million Dollar Skunksworks Kirkham

[David Kirkham]

Now we are starting to get to the good stuff.

There is a lot of information here on serious materials selection. When I thought of the quote below, I had some specific people in mind. Kenny Hill of Metalore, Mike McCluskey of McCluskey Ltd., Peter Brock, the late Dennis Balchin, the late Carroll Smith, Dr. Kent Kohkonen--BYU Manufacturing Engineering, Dr. Perry Carter-- BYU Manufacturing Engineering, Dr. Richard Heckmann--BYU Histology, and Dr. Cathrine Thomas BYU Religion. Most of these people I spoke about in the book or they are well known in the industry.

You may all wonder about Dr. Thomas of the BYU Religion Department. At BYU religion is pretty much required all the time. One semester religion wasn't fitting in to my schedule and I was "stuck" with an honors religion class on the New Testament as the only one that could fit. The first day Dr. Thomas assigned a paper that could only be one page long. She said honors students had a hard time with one page papers but she really wanted us to think when we wrote it. The next day I turned it in and the following day she returned the graded papers to everyone in the class--except me.

Of course, after class I went up to see what was going on. She kindly answered everyone's questions and somehow quite deftly left me until the end--when everyone else had left the class. Then she looked at me, pulled the my paper out from her folder and handed it to me. It was awash in red ink. Interestingly, there was NO grade a the top. She looked at me and simply said, "David, you are better than this. Turn it in when it is right." She was right. I had just blown through that "dumb religion" paper. It was not my best work by any measure. I could tell I had let her down. I could tell she knew I had let myself down. That brief moment at her desk changed my life. I'm sure she knew all semester long I wasn't the honors type religion student. But that whole semester she treated me (and everyone else in that class) as if I (we) was the most important scholar on campus. She knew what she believed--and she acted accordingly She expected her students to act accordingly as well. I'll never forget her.