Oral-History:Richard Gowen (2018)

About Richard Gowen

IEEE Life Fellow, Richard J. (Dick) Gowen (1935-2021) received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Rutgers University in 1957, where he also served in the ROTC. He then began work at the RCA Research Laboratories, but was called to active duty with the Air Force. While in the Air Force, he began graduate study at Iowa State University. He earned his M.S. in electrical engineering in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1962.

Gowen then joined the faculty of the Air Force Academy. While at the Air Force Academy, he directed the joint NASA-Air Force space medical instrumentation program and led the design of medical experiments in the Apollo and Skylab space programs. He was also a member of the NASA astronaut medical launch recovery team for six capsule space flights. Additionally, he served as a government consultant for the Department of Defense. He retired from the Academy in 1977 as a professor of electrical engineering with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Dr. Gowen continued his work in education as Vice President and Dean of Engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. After seven years there, he moved to Dakota State College as President. In 1987, he then returned to South Dakota School of Mines and Technology as president of that institution. The school’s profile was raised under his leadership. Gowen guided the development of new engineering programs and an expansion of graduate research, including projects served the needs of NASA and the military. SDSMT’s ROTC also flourished under Dr. Gowen’s tenure. Gowen actively promoted Native American involvement in the sciences and worked to improve South Dakota’s retention of state-educated individuals.

Gowen retired from SDSMT in 2003. Afterward he was appointed to the South Dakota Board of Education. He has coordinated the conversion of the Homestake Gold Mine into a National Science Foundation supported National Underground Science Laboratory. He served as President and CEO of Dakota Power which was established to develop lightweight electric drive systems for military and civilian use.

In 1984, Gowen served as president of the IEEE. He served as president of the IEEE Foundation from 2005 to 2011. He also served as president of the American Association of Engineering Societies in 1986. He was named as an Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu in 2002.

About the Gowen Oral Histories

During a ten-year period (2009-2018), Gowen recorded four lengthy and detailed oral histories with staff of the IEEE History Center. In these life story oral histories, Gowen discussed his early life, education, military service, and his career as an engineer, inventor, professor, administrator, and President of South Dakota School of Mines. His successful career included decades of service to professional organizations, especially IEEE. In addition to service as the 1984 IEEE President, and the President of the IEEE Foundation (1984 and 2005-2011), he also served as president of the American Association of Engineering Societies in 1986. And, he and his wife Nancy had been extremely very active volunteers and philanthropists in South Dakota and in many educational, community, and church organizations especially in Rapid City and the surrounding area.

In the oral histories, Gowen spoke about being born and raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and after graduating high school attending the hometown university. He received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Rutgers University in 1957, where he also served in the ROTC. He started work at the RCA Research Laboratories, but the Air Force called him to active duty. While in the Air Force he and his wife Nancy, moved around the USA, and he began graduate study at Iowa State University, earning an M.S. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1962, both in electrical engineering with a focus in the emerging field of biomedical engineering. He directed the joint NASA-Air Force space medical instrumentation program, and he supervised the design of medical experiments in the Apollo and Skylab space programs.

Gowen also reminisced about his more than sixty-five-year membership in IEEE. He recalled many joyful IEEE experiences, especially his decision to join the AIEE, one of IEEE’s predecessor organizations, as a Rutgers student while working on his senior project. He said: “I was doing my senior design project. I submitted that as a student paper, so that’s how I joined IEEE. I presented a paper in Brooklyn at Brooklyn Poly. It was either in the early summer or I guess late winter. As matter of fact, I think I’ve got the paper upstairs. I can pull that out and we can just get dates and things off it. In the process, I ended up being the number two paper. It was a very, very frustrating piece for me, and I ended up calling this ‘Mysterious Michael Maze-Mastering Mouse.’”

Indeed, he joined as a student member, was elevated to IEEE Fellow, and as IEEE’s Centennial President, in 1984, he travelled the world representing the Institute at many commemorate celebrations, conferences, and events. Then post-presidency, he spent nearly three decades volunteering for both IEEE and the IEEE Foundation. He remained active through dynamic, and sometimes challenging times, as the AIEE and IRE merged in 1963; IEEE-USA was founded; and then beginning in the 1980s, IEEE became more active globally.

As an IEEE Past-President, Gowen remained a tremendously active IEEE volunteer who appreciated history, and while Chair of the IEEE History Committee in 2007-2008, Gowen guided the development of the IEEE Global History Network (GHN), which evolved into the Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW). Indeed, his desire to help preserve the history of IEEE and its related technologies, led him to write a First-Hand History about GHN and another about leading a research team to develop the capability for the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) to evaluate physiological changes in astronauts that occurred during the weightlessness of zero gravity spaceflight.

Gowen’s oral histories include:

• Richard Gowen, #522, an oral history conducted on 14 November 2009 by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
• Richard Gowen, #533, an oral history conducted on 6 March 2010 by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
• Richard Gowen, #568, an oral history conducted on 23 September 2011 by Michael Geselowitz, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
• Richard Gowen, #818, an oral history conducted 7 June 2018 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Gowen wrote two First-Hand Histories, A Quest for Understanding Weightlessness and History of the GHN and a very well-received speech celebrating the IEEE Centennial in 1984 (see Richard Gowen Speech (1984). The speech made on 5 April 1984 began with an introduction by Eric Herz, Executive Director, IEEE. In this speech, Gowen provided a brief history of IEEE and thanked IEEE staff for their service and presented them with several centennial celebration gifts in recognition of their contribution to the success of IEEE.

About the Interview

RICHARD GOWEN: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, 7 June 2018

Interview # 818 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Copyright Statement

This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.

Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Richard Gowen, an oral history conducted in 2018 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Interview

INTERVIEWEE: Richard Gowen

INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel

DATE: 7 June 2018

PLACE: Rapid City, SD

Early life and education, Rutgers

Hellrigel:

This is Mary Ann Hellrigel, Archivist and Institutional Historian at the IEEE History Center. Today is 7 June 2018. I am at the home of Dr. Richard (Dick) Gowen [in Rapid City, South Dakota]. We are here to talk about the history of the IEEE Foundation and some other aspects of IEEE history.

Gowen:

It is 2:30 in the afternoon, so we are on Rapid City time.

Hellrigel:

Yes, we are in Rapid City, South Dakota. Thank you, sir. Later, we can talk about your earlier oral history recordings. They are very informative and focus on your education, career, and IEEE Presidency during the IEEE Centennial [in 1984].

Gowen:

Good.

Hellrigel:

Now a little bit about this recording. The project that is on hand today is the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the IEEE Foundation. Five individuals have been selected to record oral histories for the first stage of our project. You are one of the individuals because you were President of IEEE and President of the IEEE Foundation. Now you are President Emeritus of the IEEE Foundation. You were really there at the beginning of the Foundation, so everyone on the committee suggested I speak to you. Thank you for your time.

Gowen:

Well, thank you, Mary Ann, appreciate you coming out.

Hellrigel:

From reading your earlier historical information, I know that you were born and raised in New Jersey and started your affiliation with IEEE as a member of the AIEE as a student.

Gowen:

I was a senior at Rutgers [University], and I was doing my senior design project. I submitted that as a student paper, so that’s how I joined IEEE.

Hellrigel:

You presented a paper at the conference?

Gowen:

I presented a paper in Brooklyn at Brooklyn Poly. It was either in the early summer or I guess late winter. As matter of fact, I think I’ve got the paper upstairs. I can pull that out and we can just get dates and things off it. In the process, I ended up being the number two paper. It was a very, very frustrating piece for me, and I ended up calling this “Mysterious Michael Maze-Mastering Mouse.”

Hellrigel:

Oh, that is a provocative title.

Gowen:

That’s my paper. [Shows Hellrigel the paper.] It was a device that I built, and while building it, it sat on four chairs. I put four chairs around and then built the device sitting on the chairs because I didn’t want to bend over. I could get in the device, in effect. We did not have integrated circuits or transistors that were publicly available, so Rutgers had no transistors. I ended up using relays and Western Electric provided relays. I made a unit, and the final result basically was a four-by-four-foot glass plate and underneath the glass plate I put an X-Y plotter that I made. You could control the X-Y plotter by the relays that I put together. Then on top of the glass plate was a mouse, an electrical mechanical mouse. Then on the glass plate you put up pieces of material, and you build a maze. You had four-by-four, and you were going to take the electrical mechanical mouse, put it down in the maze, and then you could go.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Gowen:

It tracked the maze to see if you could find the cheese. Now, the cheese was actually the X-Y plotter. The X-Y plotter would be at a location and the mouse at the top was connected. What you were doing was you were going out and you were tapping each of the sides. In effect, it’s a four-by-four glass plate, which was the essence of it, and then you put this maze on top. It went around and it conveniently went to each of the sides. If you think, if you had a square, one end of the square was open. You put the mouse down on the square. It went to each side and found the open position.

Then it went through the opening, and it went to the next square. And it mapped that out. When it got all done, it had mapped out what was sitting there electronically. Now you could take the mouse and you could put it down anywhere in the area, and it knew where the cheese was. It was just go quickly, and drive to the cheese.

Hellrigel:

By finding the holes in the layout?

Gowen:

Yes. Well, in the way that the walls were.

Hellrigel:

This might be a silly question, but what do you think was the intended purpose for your mouse project?

Gowen:

The way it started is that the faculty at Rutgers knew I had a fascination with computers and logic. We didn’t have books on computers and logic at that point in time. When I was a junior, they found a senior student and put the two of us together. We bounced back and forth, talking about computers. That’s where I got my input of education upon how to start. The senior student basically explained to me, “well, you can do ‘if’ and ‘and’ statements.”

Hellrigel:

X and Y.

Gowen:

Yes. I basically built an “if” and “and” statement. If you find that there was a wall there, back off. If you find there was a wall there, take a 90-degree turn. It was a relatively straightforward logic set. You were just trying to map out where the barriers were. When you found out where the barriers were, inversely then you knew where the openings were. You just flipped over the logic, so to speak, and then you put the mouse down and the mouse went for it.

Hellrigel:

This was a precursor of a thinking computer?

Gowen:

Oh, yes.

Hellrigel:

And artificial intelligence or something different?

Gowen:

We now know that term, but at the time it was a fascination with how you could program an electrical mechanical device.

Hellrigel:

Program it to do something?

Gowen:

To be a computer. It was early, so when I went into graduate school and I went to Iowa State, Iowa State was just trying to build a memory unit. This was very early in the development of computers. At Iowa State you took an address, and you converted that over into a code. Then you had an A plus B, so you could make an A plus B, and have a C. That’s where I went into graduate education. It was boring.

Hellrigel:

At that time, was [John Vincent] Atanasoff at Iowa State?

Gowen:

I don’t know that name at Iowa State.

Hellrigel:

He’s an early computer engineer and inventor.

Gowen:

Oh, yes. Iowa State was pushing to be a leader in computers. The technology that was all the leading time, so that’s what sold me on going into computers.

I ended up at Iowa State by virtue of the Air Force. The Air Force is going to send me to graduate school, and for whatever reason, Iowa State was on the list. I had no choice. I was sent to Iowa State.

Hellrigel:

You were ROTC in college?

RCA, Air Force

Gowen:

I went through Rutgers on ROTC, and it was financially helpful. When I finished and came out of Rutgers, it was after the Korean War, and it was quiet. There was nothing going on. I didn’t expect that I was going to get called back to duty. Now, RCA came into this discussion.

Hellrigel:

Cherry Hill, New Jersey?

Gowen:

No Princeton. I applied to go down and have a visit at Princeton. I didn’t even know who was going to choose, whether they would do that or not. They wanted my resume. I just described my resume to you. I wasn’t smart enough to know what they were doing. They invited me down, so I cut a lab class in my senior year and went down. I had fifteen interviews.

Hellrigel:

That’s a lot of interviews.

Gowen:

When you’re sort of at the top of the class you get a lot of them.

Hellrigel:

You get a lot of action.

Gowen:

I was trying to think of where we wanted to go. When I went down to RCA, for the first time in my life, I was continually challenged. It is what they did. They put three teams of two lab people together at a time. It was an interview, and they’d ask me questions. Finally, I caught on to that when they understood that I understood what I was talking about, they asked another question. It was disjointed, from my perspective. I never really got time to say what I wanted to say, again from my perspective. From their perspective, they were working at different orientation.

Hellrigel:

They wanted to see how you could dance, pounding you with their questions.

Gowen:

Absolutely. What was I doing? Did I really know? When I told them about doing the coding and all that, it didn’t take them long. You know, did I know or not, and was I able to do this? By that point in time, it was now working. I’m down there at RCA and the HR person said to me “How’s recruiting going?” After going through these three sessions, I was so dejected because I didn’t get the chance to really tell them what I was doing. Well, I didn’t realize they got what they wanted out of me. I explained [how recruiting was going], and two weeks later I got the best offer.

Hellrigel:

From the Air Force?

Gowen:

No.

Hellrigel:

From RCA?

Gowen:

Yes, RCA. RCA just bounced me out. There was no question whether I would take their offer. I don’t even remember how, but it was better than all the other offers I had.

Hellrigel:

Yes, and it was big time?

Gowen:

It was.

Hellrigel:

R&D [research and development], too.

Gowen:

Everything was good, so I went to work at RCA. Oh, it must have been a month or maybe a month and a half. Then I got a greetings and salutations letter.

I was called to active duty, and that’s how I started in the computer area from a point of view of industry.

Did I mention that we had been integrated already? We didn’t want to go through Panama City and all that stuff. To me, the Air Force was the Air Force. It didn’t matter a lot where you went, so that’s why we went to Yaak. When I showed up at the guard gate at Yaak I didn’t really know where I was. But the guard on duty said “We’re going to check you out. Go over there and put your hands up on the wall. We’re going to frisk you.”

Hellrigel:

Oh, they frisked you?

Gowen:

I got frisked and there wasn’t a hole left that wasn’t frisked. In the process, I swore them off, “My god, what’s going on?” It turned out about three weeks earlier the Office of Special Investigations had penetrated this radar site and found that it was too relaxed. So, it went on. That day the commander of the site was a captain. Subsequently, I learned he was a permanent captain because he had screwed up enough that they didn’t want to discharge him.

Hellrigel:

He plateaued; his career peaked?

Gowen:

Oh, subsequently, I found out that he had a group of buddies who were running the top site. When I came on board, I said, “This place needs order,” so I organized the top site. What I didn’t realize is I organized the group of buddies.

They now had this young lieutenant who they’re going to have fun with. They didn’t all go up to work, and they’d send up someone to sign in. The rest just stayed down and drank.

Hellrigel:

Oh, no.

Gowen:

One of the people who I signed in was a young man who for some reason resonated with me. He went to one of the other captains up there who was doing the site operations. Then I just got a message that said, “You ought to check your log.” Honestly, I didn’t know the deal,

Hellrigel:

Count heads.

Gowen:

Well, it was count signatures. When I counted, I detected, you’d have to be a genius, but you look at it and the writing is elements of the same. I went to each of the guys, asked the question, and I ended up with direct evidence that they weren’t where they should be. I talked to another officer and said, “Well, what am I going to do?” He said, “These are his drinking buddies.” How should I handle it? His answer was very interesting, and he said, “Just go down and tell him what happened, and then watch and see what he does.” I went to the captain and told him what happened. Now, this was the captain on the day that I checked in. The day I checked in he said, “Oh, buddy, why don’t you sleep in my bed tonight because you’re just here and you aren’t squared away yet.” I didn’t discover he was down in town, shacking up.

Hellrigel:

You walked into a mess.

Gowen:

I walked into it. We didn’t have the trailer up there yet. I didn’t have a family up there yet. Ultimately, it all worked out well. We had a gentleman who had been a butcher, literally butchering meat, assigned as the captain of the site, so we would meet with him. Before he would arrive at the door, we had been through all the Disney songs and all because there were twelve of us young officers. That’s how I entered the military. It was the post graduate education that I mentioned, you couldn’t get that in school. There were 212 people there and sixty or seventy of them worked for me. I had the largest group cohesive. It was a great opportunity to get to know how industry works, because what I was working on was doing what it takes to get a job done.

I convinced the Air Force that it needed to redesign the gap fillers. What convinced them to work with me? I needed to stabilize the DC generators that were running the gap fillers. When they were designed, they were designed for heavy duty gap fillers, and these gap fillers were lightweight. They couldn’t keep stability in their frequency. We had gap fillers around to be able to detect Russian bombers coming down the valley. They couldn’t detect anything because the frequencies would vary and when it varies you can’t run a piece of electronic equipment that’s dependent upon frequencies. As a young pup again, I understood that problem. I said, “Well, we can fix that.”

In the major site that we were at, we had very, very large antennas in a rubber cocoon. That basically kept them stable in the winter and that was all good. I took a six-by-six, which is a truck about as wide as there over to here [gestures distance], and on it, I put the light units for keeping the dome. I took one of the light units that puts enough electricity into heat and lights up the dome so that the snow that falls on it melts off.

Hellrigel:

Oh, to melt off the snow.

Gowen:

I took one of those, went out to one of the radar sites, and had them hook it up. What did it do? It lit the town at night.

Hellrigel:

Sure, a big search light.

Gowen:

Yes, a big search light. I didn’t need the heat. What I needed was the energy. I loaded down the generator to the point that it had to work like a generator. Instead of just sitting 10 percent, it was now operating 50 percent, so that may be stable. Now suddenly, this gap filler is working like it should work. The Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs is seeing this gap filler start to work. The question is, “What are you doing to make this work?” I explained to them what I’m doing. That caught their attention and they let me take this radar site as a research test site and go in and stabilize it. The Air Force now had a radar site that didn’t work earlier, but now it is working. The guy who is working it, is available. However, the Air Force, in its infinite wisdom, reassigned me.

Hellrigel:

To Iowa State? Oh no, by this point you graduated from Iowa State.

Gowen:

I graduated, I’m a Ph.D., and I’m working. The Air Force decided that they needed me to be out working in one of the radar stations where they were having trouble, so they found a new job for me. I went back in and said to the commander, “Looks like I ‘m going to leave you.” He said, “Well, do you have plans for everything you’re doing up on the hill and what we can use?” I said, “Yes, they are in my head. But, let me explain something to you. If you don’t see me because I’m going to be working up on the hill for at least two weeks, the Air Force is going to find somebody else to fill that position.” A little collusion here and there. I didn’t show up for the administration checks for duty, and the position got reassigned., so we could finish. That’s the kind of education that I got because you couldn’t just get that.

Hellrigel:

Yes, getting it done may differ from working in a lab.

Gowen:

You’re down and you’re in a big system. Now you start looking at how do we work the system, to come together. Ultimately, we got the gap filler to work.

What the gap filler did was take height and elevation and position and put it all together. Now you had a 3D knowledge base of where the airplane was coming.

So, if you would then put that in. And this was a site that if you think of a great big screen and people plotting on the screen where airplanes are going, and so you knew where all the airplanes of that part of the United States was going.

You had the ability to tell if something was coming in. The Air Force was just at that point in time starting to work on super speed aircraft.

Hellrigel:

This is the radar technology.

Gowen:

Radar technology. We’re taking the radar signal out of the gap filler. We know the X-Y plot of it. We call the X-Y plot in. Then the people who are there go up and they plot where on the X-Y plane where you knew an airplane was. Then you knew where the next airplane was.

Hellrigel:

They could extrapolate?

Gowen:

They could show you the flight path. The Air Force was just bringing in high speed aircraft, so they were not in the inventory. What would occur is that there’d be a fast-flying blip coming across, so you knew that you had either an outside plane that’s coming in and you knew its direction. You knew where it came from. Then you knew it was an inside plane. We did all of that as it came together. All of that basically ended when I’m getting ready to leave. They closed the gap filler because now they took that technology and built it in a town called Spear-Whitefish, which was off to the east. That’s where they built a new radar station. That was now the new gap filler, which we had developed.

I didn’t think a lot about it. I’m too busy doing things. Then, one day, it sort of hit me here as I’m doing this, is that you’ve taken a young Air Force officer who doesn’t have really a lot of experience.

What I built at Iowa State when I was there, that was the build on from Rutgers.

I had learned that by putting relays together and putting that all in, I gained a devil of a lot of experience that I carried with me. When I went to Iowa State and was doing my Ph.D., all that experience filtered in. I have upstairs here my Ph.D. piece that I made up as a way that you could tie blood pressure in with reality. If you think about being on a treadmill, you’re walking on a treadmill, and you’ve got your arms out to the treadmill. If you want to take blood pressure, you’re going to put a blood pressure cuff on, but the blood pressure cuff can’t work because you’re doing this with your arm. You can’t get a stable enough time to be able to tell whether the pressure on the blood pressure cuff, so I built an instrument that measured blood pressure off your finger.

Hellrigel:

Oh, I have seen those in a hospital.

Gowen:

Yes. I have the original patented one up here. I built the finger blood pressure. When you got on the treadmill, you slid your finger into this little duct, and the duct put a measuring unit on the end of your finger. Then you could do the treadmill and they could get the information off you. This was a major change. We had Presbyterian Hospital in Allenton, the big town south of Ames, [Iowa] and that’s where we took it to be applied so that you could make it work. It worked, and my Ph.D. thesis was validated by testing in the hospital. Out of all that, it was a great success.

I went off to the Air Force Academy, and shortly after I arrived the number two person on the faculty staff said “This is research. This is a teaching institute. We don’t do research here.” I said, “Well, the Air Force is a research unit.” He said, “But that’s downstairs. That’s not up here.” Hmm, I just found my challenge because I’m going to do research. I’m going to take what I did, and I’m going to expand it. I met my challenge, so I’m quietly thinking all of this through. When I was told that you’re not going to do research, it came up against my noise, so I started my research program.

Hellrigel:

How did you end up at the Air Force Academy? Did you have a choice to go somewhere else?

Gowen:

No. The Air Force Academy, it was four years before I came there. The academy existed up in Denver and then it moved down to Colorado Springs [in 1958].

Hellrigel:

To the new campus.

Gowen:

They had the buildings and now they were bringing students down. It was growing, so they were looking for faculty. I sent in an application and said, “I’m interested in coming down and teaching at the Air Force Academy.” They had my resume and everything. I came out and they said, “We like you.” So, that’s how I go to the Air Force Academy.

If you think about how you keep moving, it’s based on what you’ve done. What is your experience? My resume meant this is my experience. I had fit in with a resume that had wild experience. To have a person who is a senior student at Rutgers building this Maze-Mastering Mouse, and it works. Wow.

Hellrigel:

Yes, you accomplished the mouse project as a young person, maybe twenty-two-years-old.

Gowen:

Oh, yes. You look across the background. RCA caught that, and that’s how they hired me. When RCA knew that the Air Force wanted me to go and was offering me to be part of a Ph.D. program and to be engaged, they said “We’ll do the same thing.” RCA hadn’t been in the education business, but there is competition. I said, “I’d love to be able to come back to you, but the Air Force has already given me [an] assignment and I’m probably not going to be able to get out of that.” That’s the early background early.

Just the realization that you could do things, is how I got to the Air Force Academy. When I got there and got told, “You’re not going to be able to do research,” the answer was, “Hmm, I think I’ll show you.”

AIEE

Hellrigel:

During this part of your career, are you very active in the AIEE?

Gowen:

Yes. I had just started as a student. In IEEE, a group of us were unhappy because the nexus of activity was not biomedical. We decided that’s got to change. We were bold enough as a group that we were going to change the way IEEE functioned. When we came into IEEE it was a time of change. Now, we didn’t know what we were doing. We were just getting to know IEEE. This ended up putting me in the Board of Directors because we went through IEEE leadership and basically had enough challenging questions that the IEEE leadership caught on that there’s something in Colorado Springs. They realized there’s a group of people in Colorado Springs that wants to change IEEE. This got the Board of Directors’ attention. We were not a Section yet. We were not formally in. We were just a group of people who were rabble-rousers and it got us into the situation that people knew we were serious about wanting to do this. We didn’t have to because no one was pushing us. We were pushing ourselves as a nexus of a group that focus upon, well, why do you want to do this? What do you need? We were in Region 5, and ultimately, I had a position that was on the Board of Region 5.

I am on the Board of Region 5, so then the question was what’s IEEE structure and where do we fit in. Well, we’ve got this regional group and we have this technical group. It was really clear we were interested in the technical group because what we were interested in was making sure that IEEE had a technical group that was focused upon biomed. Then I am lobbying to be a technical director of Region 5, and that ultimately put me into IEEE as a technical director on TAB [Technical Activities Board]. My path moved from sort of where is it.

Hellrigel:

You became active through the technical side of the IEEE organization.

Gowen:

Yes, through the technical side, and it put me in the technical side as a member of TAB. Now at that point, I probably had a lot of, the word that sort of comes to mind is a prejudice word but it’s “moxie.”

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, the Yiddish words chutzpah and moxie. You have the confidence, courage, or determination to do it.

South Dakota School of Mines & Technology

Gowen:

Yes, you got chutzpah, moxie, you’re going to do it.

I’m in there, on the technical side. I’m the young one and I’m now pushing to [figure out] how do we get the technical side to come together.

At about that point in time, I retired from the Air Force. I left the Air Force Academy and the people up here in Rapid City, [South Dakota] had decided that I ought to apply to be the vice president [at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology]. I retired one day and the next day I was the vice president.

I brought a lot of the things I did at the Air Force Academy. For instance, if you got a letter grade D here in School of Mines, you got a letter from me, asking you to come in and visit with me. At the Air Force Academy, I was part of a group that [felt that] kids are chosen because they’re very good. You can be very good, but you can get off into a hole that you can’t get out of, so the Academy has set up a process. If you had grade problems at the Air Force Academy, you had to appear before the group of officers who were going to help you get straightened out.

A physician sat next to me at one of these meetings and says, “My God. I never would want to come before you people” because we were very focused. We knew what had happened and we had to change the interest of that cadet. When you put your hand up to be a cadet, you’re now a cadet. If you drop out, that position is gone, and we are developing officers. What we did is you came in and you spent an hour with us. It’s like we’re talking here, but it is a pointed hour. We asked questions: “How do you study? Where do you study? What do you do? Do you have the radio on?”

The honor code is telling you that you’ve got to tell the truth. I’m sitting there and I’m just drilling you down to the point where I know who and what you are. Then the next time you come in, we have agreed that you’re going to get a C or a B, so you’re going to give me a piece of paper for every test you’ve taken in the time that we’ve been apart, and it’s going to have a C or a B on it. You have graded your own test and you’ve graded it in your mind, whether what you did was good or bad. Now you start with that plan, and you work it.

I took that up here and did the same thing with the School of Mines people who got a letter grade D. Now, there was one secret up here that I knew, and the Mines students knew, but they couldn’t do anything about it. It was who was going to help you as a mentor. Instead of me doing it, I was going to turn it over to the people who are here.

Hellrigel:

Students?

Gowen:

The students. Who did I turn it over to?

Hellrigel:

The Honor Society? I don’t know.

Gowen:

No. It’s a difference of the two of us sitting here, and it has to do with our genetics. I turned it over to the female students because the female students here became successful students. They knew how to study best of all. The fact that you were sent by the dean over to be part of their program, it just was icing on the cake. The students here were pleased to come in, visit with me, and get a recommendation.

Hellrigel:

When did it become co-ed?

Gowen:

Well, they were co-ed all the time.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay. That is different.

Gowen:

But two students aren’t quite co-ed. When you start changing the way things act because, when I came here, the enrollment was flat and going down. When you start working the students and they see you’re here, and you’ve got an active vice president who’s really [interested], and you’re doing things, there are changes. So, that is where we started to grow a little bit differently. Seven years after I came here as vice president the invitation from the governor was “I want you to go over to Madison and be the president [of Dakota State College, now Dakota State University]. Take it over and run it.”

Hellrigel:

To the state college?

Gowen:

I don’t want to do that because I know that the School of Mines is going to be looking for a president. I know there’s another guy out there who wants that job, so that kind of competition is fun. However, as I told you, I ended up going to Madison, [South Dakota, in 1984] and three years later I got called back in.

At this point in time, the Board of Regents was like military training. Part of the military training I had to take was if you are captured by the enemy, how do you resist. I’m sitting in this chair and all around me are the regents that are coming in and telling me what I have got to do, and I’m thinking how do I resist this? I told them, “Well, can I think it over?” The first year I said, “I’m thinking it over.” That was fine. The executive director of the Board of Regents came in and said, “Dick, I have to deliver a message to you. Your increase in pay was cut in half.” You don’t realize who you are working for.

Hellrigel:

Whoa.

Gowen:

I went to the governor and said, “God, what kind of involvement do you people have?” He did not know. Nobody had told him they were going to do that because they did it on the last day. They brought me in and wanted to reassign me. Basically, I said, “I don’t want to be reassigned.” The next year we went through the same process, only they didn’t ask me. They were telling me because I worked for them. That’s how I ended up back here at the School of Mines.

Hellrigel:

With a cut in pay?

Gowen:

No.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay.

Gowen:

When I came back, they raised my pay. It’s in the world of what we are and the kind of education and experience you get. By going through all this [it] shapes you. That’s been the continual shaping I’ve had. I really have enjoyed South Dakota because of the way they treat you, if you’re going where you need to be and going in the way it should be.

Hellrigel:

Did you find the people and culture more straightforward?

Gowen:

Yes. I was speaking with one of the regents, he was one of those regents who would throw a bomb. I said to him, “Danny, let me say politely something to you. The object of it is to let go of the bomb when you throw it.

Hellrigel:

Yes, do not travel with it.

Gowen:

That is the kind of involvement we were here. I think the faculty at the School of Mines, and I enjoyed each other. The reputation here, for the most part, is that we really enjoy each other. It was you knew you were going to leave, but we didn’t want you to leave type of situation. Since you’ve got me hooked up, it’s a little hard.

Hellrigel:

Oh, sorry to get you tied up with the lapel microphone wire.

Gowen:

That’s a basket. Right over there.

Hellrigel:

Okay. I’ll get the basket.

Gowen:

Yes, the basket that has ping-pong balls in it. It was one of the last things I was given at Madison. They gave me a basket full of ping-pong balls, each one of which had a number on it. During the time that I was president, I’d say “we have another challenge to excel.” Somebody would catch on and say, “What’s the number?” Well, the number was how challenging this was going to be. They gave it to me and the opportunity to excel is on it

Hellrigel:

Excel, O-T-E [opportunity to excel].

Gowen:

What I wasn’t sure of is that they were giving me this basket to get rid of me, because these were all the opportunities to excel, or whether in fact there was a recognition that we were able to do the things.

Hellrigel:

Right, and you summed it.

Gowen:

Yes. I keep this one around to just basically remind me.

Hellrigel:

How many numbers did you get up to?

Gowen:

We would go to three digits for most and we’d go to four digits when everything was a fire alarm.

Hellrigel:

That would be tough.

IEEE History Committee, IEEE Global History Network

Gowen:

Yes. You are getting a little bit of the background from the point of view of being engaged in an IEEE position because you carry all your experience with you.

When I came in and I mentioned to you while we were at lunch how I got to be involved with the IEEE Foundation. When Emerson Pugh asked me what I think about directing in the Foundation, I said yes. In the process, now, what I brought with me and what Emerson realized is the experience I brought in. When there was a committee of the Board looking at what should be done within the History Center I mentioned how it was a little awkward to have the person sitting next to you that was being appointed as President of the History Center, or as Chairman of the of the committee, [the IEEE History Committee], and you’re sitting here not knowing whether you’re going to get appointed. But you get appointed. Then you’ve got to get organized. One of the things that we did is there was an IEEE leader and he’s been President. He comes out of Drexel. I have his face. His name will come to me. You may know his name, one of our academic presidents about five years ago. [Gown is referring to Moshe Kam, 2011 IEEE President.] He was on the History Committee because when they put me on, I said, put so-and-so on, if you would. We said, “Well, what we are going to do is basically tell the history of technology.” What we talked about is let’s build a Wiki.

Hellrigel:

Yes, you were very important in the development of GHN [Global History Network, now ETHW, Engineering and Technology History Wiki] as both an advisor and donor.

Gowen:

Yes, the GHN is what evolved. We sat there and he didn’t want to really be in the history activity. He wanted to be President of IEEE. Then I started and said, “Well, if you’re going to tell the history of technology, the best way to tell it is to ask the person and have them tell you their history.” That was the essence of the Wiki. When we took that into the meeting and said, “We want to propose making a Wiki,” there was a revolution because the people sort of said, “You got to be kidding. You want to be able to give to anybody the ability to go in and tell what they’ve done? Then you’re going to put that out as a record?” We said yes. Well, what could you trust? You can’t trust what they’re going to tell you. If you agree to put it out, then you basically have changed IEEE. You can’t do that. We talked about it, and we talked about responsibility. We talked about the fact that if you put it out, who is going to control it. And you point out that’s going to be the people who are engaged. You don’t have to go in and take it out.

Hellrigel:

Yes, you do not referee it.

Gowen:

You don’t referee it. You don’t have to. It took a while to get that concept through, and for two years I was working on the development of the Wiki. A guy, [John] Vardalas came on board. We contracted with a company that is just down the road from IEEE, and ultimately, they went through [with it].

[At that time,] Wiki’s were brand new in IEEE, in the world. You had Wikipedia and people could understand Wikipedia, but Wikipedia tells the story of a piece of technology. It doesn’t necessarily have personal involvement.

When you have the way that you tell your story, and that’s what goes out, that puts a new emphasis within IEEE. I traveled around the world. Basically, I travelled to the four non-U.S. Regions and Sections. I talked about it and asked would you be engaged in doing this? Japan looked at me and sort of smiled and patted me on the head because Japan could do the technology and America couldn’t. We were racing to beat Japan. We were not the players; it was Japan. They were nice to us and did all the nice things, but they were not interested.

Then I went to India. When I was in India, India caught on. India became more interested in computers. IBM had an office in Delhi. And so, when I was in India there was a large organization that was going out to villages to talk to villages, saying “Why don’t you become engaged in trying to get the village people to use IBM as a way of communicating?” We’re visiting in this village and the people sort of said, “Can you get IBM to work with us?” Sure, I can, why not? The next time I was there, I went up to IBM’s office. IBM has an IEEE leader coming in their office, and why not.

Hellrigel:

Certainly.

Gowen:

We are talking and the director of the Delhi IBM comes in, and we talk for a bit. To his credit, he caught the ideas and what was going on, and that developed a relationship with IBM’s Delhi office and then with the people engaged. Then I had to talk at IBM conferences as a result of that. They liked the message I was delivering because it was their message, but I was delivering it. The fact that you had an IEEE leader talking, who was sort of over the line, and industry wanted to be involved, so all of that evolved. I still keep tabs tracking some of the people in Delhi, who write me saying “I’m interested in this. Can you help? Where should we go?” Delhi developed a critical office, but technology was moving rapidly, more rapidly globally than the Delhi office. Delhi never really had the credit for developing its ability to work with the local community, and having the local community be able to put a Wiki together and send it out. You had a different involvement. It goes to strange places.

When I was the leader of the IEEE history, that started the connection, but the connection really fertilized into a great deal of fruition when I started really going out and visiting the international Sections and the international Regions.

Then Region 10 came on like gangbusters. It was incredibility important, and basically, it just continued to grow. Between India and Region 10, you’ve got the competition of how do you make this sort of all connect. Then when you start seeing the growth and, the growth was inevitable, and the fact that you could tie in a humanitarian side opened a whole new perspective. For instance, I visited Kerala and I spoke at a conference in Kerala and talked about IEEE. There were forty-two student Sections associated that came to the conference.

Hellrigel:

In India? Wow. How about Africa in Region 8?

Gowen:

Yes, it is Region 8, and that’s a stable Region, so we didn’t need enthusiasm, we were okay. In Kerala, the student Sections were growing. So, when Kerala brings this person in who is a proactive person to talk about humanitarian activities, they took off. They moved into humanitarian activities, looking at local elements. If we have a flood, what happens? If a tsunami comes in, what happens? We have all these villages that need to know what’s there, so we worked with then and we worked on mapping. We basically took the areas that could flood and mapped it, and then we put a recovery plan into it. It was at the level that you could help the people who live there, and the students caught it. It was interesting to just watch the growth.

Hellrigel:

That was an IEEE Foundation project?

Gowen:

No. We were in Kerala. The funding for the conference was a Kerala function.

The students were connected into their Sections through Kerala, through the money that was there. They got the money by going to their Section. Here’s a group of students that are very enthusiastic and they’ve caught a problem. If the Section and the Region have difficulty with a flood, somebody is going to pay for that. When you start that, since it is local, it just connects. You got into the IEEE and as the IEEE functions, if you have a need, somebody is going to catch that need and find the money to make it come together. It is basic IEEE, as we’ve been for years. Yet, when the students are developing it, it is the future.

Hellrigel:

Right. The Young Professionals.

Gowen:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

It is grassroots. India has floods and the monsoon season every year.

Gowen:

It is a serious question for them. They had something that they could come together on, and that didn’t come out of me. It came out from within the Section and Region because, I’m talking and ask what is your critical issue?

Well, it is floods. Then I’m talking to them, “Well, what could you do about it?” That is where the mapping came. It was a local effort that grew out of somebody outside.

Hellrigel:

Yes, how could we take an IEEE technology and make it useful, which is paramount.

Gowen:

Yes, yes.

Hellrigel:

It is also getting the information from within, so it’s not like an outside colonialism situation.

Gowen:

You don’t have to tell them what to do.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Gowen:

They know.

Hellrigel:

They know their needs.

Gowen:

It’s just that they haven’t seen the pieces connected. In Kerala, forty-two students are out there as a broad-based group, some of those will get the connection and some will never get it.

Gowen:

It’s just humankind.

Hellrigel:

But putting them in connection with the people that can show them how to use the technology is important because maybe they don’t have a professor that’s doing that or realizing that someone can give them advice, or where the funding even comes from.

Gowen:

There was another project that grew out of that named “If you’re blind, can you code.”

Hellrigel:

In braille?

Gowen:

Could you do computer coding?

Hellrigel:

If you have a braille keyboard?

Gowen:

When you type, do you worry about whether it’s a braille key or do you know where the key is?

Hellrigel:

If you memorize where the keys are; however, there are braille keyboards.

Gowen:

Sure, if you are trained where the keys are. What evolved is that in Delhi, IEEE came together and built the ability to be able to provide software and built it by basically preparing people to know how the keys are. When you sat down to do something in software, you had the keys. Now, you just turn on the input for the keys because you’re recording. Could you take something that is in a piece of coding that somebody wants done and will tell you what the coding is? You’re going to basically provide the software, and the software is going to evolve out of chain.

Hellrigel:

Right, for them to hit the right symbols?

Gowen:

Yes. When we think about it, IEEE’s technology is transportable in many, many ways. We worked with that for a bit. The fact that you were blind was not an impediment. As a matter of fact, what you began to see is the blind people got to be very good with the keystrokes. You were learning there are elements of pockets of this kind of technology that sit all over the world that have an IEEE nexus because we have people. The fact that you can get people who want to do things for humanity is a major emphasis in IEEE.

Hellrigel:

Well, yes, because the problem is that many corporations or many people, if it is not profit driven or profit for them, they do not think about it. But the finance of accessibility is insurmountable.

Gowen:

There are so many things to do. You don’t have the ultimate money.

But if you are in an involvement that, if I use the term “resonates,” that is an involvement that people see. Then they begin to find a way of getting money.

Hellrigel:

Is there sometimes the challenge where people will not settle on one vision or one game plan? Like every year with new leadership do they want to either change direction or emphasis? For example, you are just getting momentum working on this coding for the blind, and then someone shifts director or pulls the funding. Is there a tendency to do that, and therefore upset a project gaining momentum and interest?

Gowen:

There is, but there’s an answer to that. That’s called technology because when you look at us, technology just continually changes.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Gowen:

Pick up the [IEEE] Spectrum and the cover of Spectrum has drones on it.

Hellrigel:

Drones, yes, the drones.

Gowen:

This is the drone issue. When you just look at life and what drones mean to us

today, so the technology changes. Now then, how do you use that? How does it

get used? So, IEEE, with the changing technology, you change what people can

do.

Hellrigel:

Right. We’ve just done some strategic planning sessions, and sometimes it seems like we get a project up and running and then it is abruptly stopped. Hypothetically, for example, the First-hand History project for the Wiki site [Engineering and Technology History Wiki, ethw.org]. We want to promote collecting these autobiographical accounts, first-hand histories, and someone might come along and say, “Ah, no, we don’t want that. We want to do something else now.” It is frustrating. Do you find sometimes that you have a good program growing, but then you might get obstacles from people that want to change it?

Gowen:

Well, they are because we all want it our way.

Hellrigel:

True.

Gowen:

Ultimately, what it becomes is a question of fundamentally is it something that people want.

Hellrigel:

True.

Gowen:

When you look at GHN [Global History Network is now Engineering and Technology History Wiki, ETHW], we were putting it together, but there was a major change in that. How many societies chose the way they’re going to make technology available? So, when you did it, it changed, but it didn’t change badly.

Hellrigel:

No.

Gowen:

It changed positively, so change is a dual edge. When you’re out giving technology that is not available commercially because you think about what company wants to take over the responsibility for GHN [ETHW].

Hellrigel:

Right. No company.

Gowen:

No company.

Hellrigel:

No.

Gowen:

It doesn’t fit the kind of business they’re in and where it goes. But, when you go to an organization in society, it fits. So, it’s an IEEE function. When you look at the inventory of IEEE, there are many functions of what IEEE will do, and the competition that’s internal, people competition, sort of slowed those down from growing.

Hellrigel:

Sometimes it does.

Gowen:

But you watch it. From a leadership point of view, that’s where you begin to say, “Hmm, this is a good leadership.” Back then in addition to being the [IEEE] Foundation developer and I got sent over to be the development of the history activity. That was a choice that was being made by IEEE leadership. [IEEE appoints the IEEE History Committee, and it presided over the creation of the IEEE History Center.]

Hellrigel:

The IEEE Board of Directors appoints members to the committees.

Gowen:

They appoint you to the committees. So quietly, like the two of us sitting here, the Board members are lobbying each other. When the appointment comes, Gowen is going to get appointed, and that’s the way that IEEE functions. It’s a serious issue because you can say that it’s not an efficient way of doing things. The Board of Directors is large, but one of the elements you get out of the Board of Directors being large is you get growth of the people who are there. You’ve got a large group of people, some of whom will get it, some of whom don’t.

Hellrigel:

Half get it?

Gowen:

Yes, but for this it goes, and that’s that management of IEEE that’s very critical from the point of view that you don’t want to limit the management. Now, that’s a very inefficient way of operating, but democracy somehow is a very efficient way of operating it. You elect people to be engaged, some of whom are kooks, some of whom are geniuses. You don’t know in advance. You bring them in. You want a democratic operation, and a corporation is not a democratic operation. It’s a hierarchy that’s focused upon a particular way of involvement. A byproduct of that is there’s going to be money coming in, and you may now be a leader in that money cycle, but then you pull back and you say, “Where’s democracy?” When you look at America our value is the capability of bringing lots of people together and tolerating what results.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Tolerating is a good expectation.

Gowen:

It is a major emphasis.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Gowen:

I’m not going talk politics.

Hellrigel:

Oh, no, no.

Gowen:

But it’s tolerating where it should be. So, that’s been a little bit of the background. Now, where do you want to go?

IEEE Foundation

Hellrigel:

You were tapped to head the IEEE Foundation, and I believe at that time the IEEE President was also president of the IEEE Foundation?

Gowen:

No.

Hellrigel:

That changed?

Gowen:

No, I was President of IEEE in 1984. When I came into the Foundation, I had been spending twenty years doing universities, so there was a difference that IEEE recognized. It’s that they understood that I had developed foundations and I understood the interface of a university foundation. So, against the background of IEEE, they now had experience that could be brought in that dealt with foundations. And the people who had sort of vetted me for going in the history, we didn’t have those meetings yet was Emerson Pugh.

And, oh golly, the person who had been the president of the IEEE Foundation before Emerson. I’m embarrassed I see his face; [Henry L. Bachman].

The two of them had cohesion and thought, go see if you can get Gowen because he’s been engaged in building university foundations. He understands how you get money in universities. It’s all together. Go get his experience. And that’s how they approached me.

Hellrigel:

They did this because at this point, they saw that raising the funds was becoming a critical issue, a problem?

Gowen:

Emerson and the other gentleman [Bachman] were trying it, and they were sort of frustrated because they weren’t getting done. What they were engaged in is the staff of the Foundation at that point in time decided that they ought to build an alumni gathering group that would be the Foundation because the way you would develop the Foundation is you take a model that people understood. It’s the alumni because most of the people at IEEE have graduated and had been approached by their alumni.

Hellrigel:

For donations?

Gowen:

To make donations. That was a period. It was a no brainer. Let’s do that. Then the question became who are your alumni, and where did you get IEEE alumni that were going to do this. You ended up going out into the membership. The more experience you had at a membership, the better they understood doing an alumni foundation. Now, that meant that you had to go out and you had to build alumni groups all around the world. Those alumni groups were going to be the groups that you were going to find money from because the alumni groups were used to giving money to the university.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Gowen:

Now we’re going to get the alumni groups and we’re going to change “university” and put in the IEEE Foundation. That’s where they were going. They were literally taking groups of alumni from university and groups of senior aged people who were engaged in the [IEEE] Foundation and training them to be alumni fundraisers.

Hellrigel:

Recruiters and fundraisers.

Gowen:

Yes. They were taking and saying, “Let us show you how.” I get reminded, there’s a reason you don’t put your arms up. I looked at that and I said there’s a fundamental flaw here. The people that you’re going to are not your big donors. What you’re doing is you’re going out to people who go to some alumni gatherings. What did they put in? They make a donation, but they’re not really fundamentally interested in putting money into the Foundation. So, that’s where I started. My first year on the Board was watching this occur and having it happen. The first year on the Board, Fern [Katronetsky] was the director of the IEEE Foundation. Fern and I bonded. We liked each other, so I had a partner. Now, Mike Geselowitz was the director of the IEEE History Center.

Hellrigel:

Yes, he was hired as the director.

Gowen:

The director of the Foundation depended upon the volunteer director who depended upon the Board. The staff director was Fern. She was very much into money because her history at IEEE was basically raising dollars from corporations and activities. We talked a bit about how you could raise money. Fern became a supporter of changing the way we were asking for money for the Foundation. Fundamentally, I was counting on Fern, and she didn’t really know me, so she wasn’t counting on me yet. She was just saying, “Okay, now you’ve been put in here and you want to do this, so I’ll help you do it.” This was the first year.

Hellrigel:

Fern was a long-term employee IEEE at this point?

Gowen:

Oh, thirty years. Basically, IEEE trusted her, and they could see that we were going to change the Foundation. They trusted whatever was going to be done. They knew I was okay, but they didn’t really realize if I was really okay. Then we said we are going to go out and we are going to recruit a [fund raiser] director of the IEEE Foundation. We put out ads and we had three responders. In a way, we had three responders. I did an unusual piece. I turned to the staff, and I said to the staff people, “Which of these responders will change the Foundation, and how will it change?” Of the responders, I had a choice of the responder in my mind. But, when I went to the staff and said to the staff, “What do you think,” I basically gave that choice up because now the--

Hellrigel:

You had to follow the staff suggestion?

Gowen:

Yes. I’ve got the people here who were going to be doing the work. So, that’s how we hired the director.

Hellrigel:

Fern?

Gowen:

No. Fern was the director of the Foundation, but the person who was going to be the fundraiser director we needed to hire.

Hellrigel:

Okay, you were hiring the fundraiser director.

Gowen:

That’s when we hired Mike. He came on board. He had worked for the Boy Scouts and knew fundraising and activities for the Boy Scouts.

Hellrigel:

Mike Geselowitz?

Gowen:

No. Not Geselowitz. His name will come to me. He lives in Trenton.

Hellrigel:

I’ll look it up. I know who you’re talking about. [Gowen is referring to Michael Deering.]

Gowen:

Yes. You know who I’m talking about. He came on. He’s soft-spoken. He didn’t upset the staff. He is you. He basically developed with the staff, so they developed as a team. The staff very much liked his mannerism. He liked the staff manner, and now we had a way of talking about money. That opened up the discussion of what the IEEE Foundation should do to start going out and raising money. It was not easy because there were people on the Board who could not see how we were asking for money, so we had some problems at the Board level from money people.

Hellrigel:

Did they think that the money should have come from IEEE?

Gowen:

No, that was the opposite. What was happening in IEEE was basically the Societies in TAB [Technical Activities Board] and the TAB units, had money.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay.

Gowen:

They knew who was going to be chasing the money, so they decided the preferred place to put the money is in the Foundation. We began to have people just basically deciding, well, we’ve got all of this money and we need that money for this and this money for this. The rest of that money should go into the Foundation where it will be secure, because it will go in the Foundation without IEEE running it because IEEE is the--

Hellrigel:

Oh, to take out of the pockets of the others?

Gowen:

Got it.

Hellrigel:

But they could not take it out of the pocket of the Foundation?

Gowen:

That’s exactly it. That caused some consternation in the IEEE Board because it took them a little time to catch on because the money was coming in, but it wasn’t coming in big dollars until some of the Foundation or some of the IEEE organizations that had big dollars stepped up to the plate.

Hellrigel:

And that is still a question today. Does your money go up to the corporate end? Does it go up to a particular OU [operating unit] in IEEE?

Gowen:

Does it become part of the whatever it is the $30 million that’s going into a particular fund or whatever.

Hellrigel:

Right. The control of funds is another issue because a lot of it is control over assets and what do you want to do with it. But, yes, I could see the dilemma for the IEEE Board that sees a new way of how money will be allocated and put out of their reach.

Gowen:

Yes. I’m of mind that that’s a driver of trying to change the board function.

You can’t necessarily tackle the TAB groups and fight with them because they’re making the money. But if you could change the structure of how IEEE functions and bring the IEEE Board of Directors down to a small number of people, you probably have a better opportunity to get cohesiveness and control. There’s lots of elements that, as I look at IEEE, I can put experiences together.

Hellrigel:

You see the different choices are roads that can be taken?

Gowen:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

There’s been some talk about moving to some virtual meetings because of the concern that so much is spent on face-to-face meetings. However, the virtual meeting takes out the direct personal interaction and networking.

Gowen:

Oh, yes. It’s a discussion that you can talk about virtual meetings, but you don’t have the same nose-to-nose.

Hellrigel:

No, you don’t.

Gowen:

I’m advocate that, well, this room is a small table, so people sit around this table and they’re about as close as you can put them together.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes.

Gowen:

They just directly know each other. So, the board here. Now, I don’t want to digress, but I’ll tell you about an international collegiate programming contest because that’s where it became a very important measure of how we could, as a group in Rapid City, take on the international community and succeed. So that’s the experience that I gained by working in IEEE and working with a large organization.

Hellrigel:

A global organization.

Gowen:

A global group with a diverse element of people who want to do things. That experience has been an essence part. So, I look at IEEE as a school for me. It basically has taught me people in a different way. When I look at the Foundation, so where we started with is going back to the Foundation.

Hellrigel:

Right, the IEEE Foundation.

Gowen:

Is that we basically had a model that was evolving. And what the model was doing, was starting to line up reasons that people should contribute to the Foundation.

I’m back to Kerala. I’m back to watching how a Region functions. I’m watching why a Region does things. Now that translates over to the Foundation, to say where the Foundation is going to start to work. One of the things we did early is we gave funding to IEEE units. You came to the Foundation, and you asked for funding because you had a project that you want funded and the IEEE Foundation could get you money.

If I now go and give you a summary of IEEE Foundation, the alumni model didn’t work. Fundamentally it was a flawed model. Then we came together, and we brought in a team of people who liked each other and could communicate. The background of the Boy Scouts was there, and Mike [Deering] understood that and was talking to the staff about how you go out and ask for money. How did you get money raised? The money raising was basically answering the needs of the people who wanted the money. Now, that came out from the experience I had by going around with humanitarian development. And with the humanitarian development knowing that if you met the needs of what the people wanted to, they had interest in meeting your money needs because, if effect, they would help you get money if you would return it back in giving them the opportunity to do projects.

Hellrigel:

Yes, funds to do something, the projects.

Gowen:

That’s how, in effect, the Foundation came into existence. Now you have four major projects in the IEEE Foundation, and they are funded basically externally.

Today, you got four major projects, and you are building those as significant, major efforts of IEEE. They started small, they grew a bit, and now you’re in the process of which you can really take on major efforts. You built the infrastructure of the Foundation. The Foundation can basically give you a response. Now you’re out taking on projects. You’re out looking at how do you develop the electrical grid around the world. And so that evolved out of an effort that--and I think the background here, but that developed out of basically finding out how you could give an ability to solar power electrical development. That was done by basically going out and building an operation. I’m going to give you money that you can have, and you can use it. But it’s going to be money you’re going to develop.

Hellrigel:

On a local level?

Gowen:

You’re going to get out and you’re going to get somebody sold upon giving you the opportunity to have a company that will use solar powered equipment, that you’ll help them get. They’ll take the solar powered equipment and go out and sell the ability to pay for it. So, that’s a model that was basically the Foundation model. But when I look at how it evolved you had a president who caught on and understood that model, and she was a dean.

Hellrigel:

Leah Jamieson.

Gowen:

Yes. She caught on and she said, well, there are four brooding elements. The electric power is one. The choice of hers was to be able to get the students engaged in developing student projects that they could basically go out into the community and do, and you got that as, as basically the reach effort.

Then the evolution continued to move. So, if you look at it, the way back when we started the Foundation as it is currently, and we had the team building, that together, they caught on and there was a very pivotal moment that came by. They were managing projects that they were giving out. They were meeting I know two times a year, if not three times a year. They were taking in projects that came out throughout IEEE. They were judging which were the projects they wanted to support. Then they were giving money out to the projects. They suddenly realized that as a staff they’re spending all their time getting people to that point, to ask for money, and then sending the money out and managing what they’re doing with the money, so that became a quiet impetus within the staff for getting out of that business.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Too much effort to monitor, right?

Gowen:

The paper end was too much. Then we looked at Stanford. His name is going to come back to me who was on the faculty at Stanford. He was basically picked up with the electric power and he’s very much one of the leaders on the electric power side. He lives in California, at Stanford. He took on building the way that you could get some organization people to basically do what the staff had been doing, but you didn’t have to ask for money because you knew the money was necessary to basically connect the electric grid. You knew you had to get to Africa. You knew you had to make connections.

Suddenly, the model just emerged, and it emerged from basically the non-staff side. The staff then said, “Ah, we’re going to support this.” That’s how you got the four capabilities, rather than the fourteen, or all of IEEE. The morphing from starting with the alumni over to the point of realizing that you could give people money and they wanted your money. So that said, all right, so you can now go into the fundraising business, but instead of doing it staff wise, let’s go out to the people who really have an interest in these projects and let them get your money for you. So that’s where you are today.

Hellrigel:

Let them raise it. And that is where they are now.

I don’t know if they’re called Signature Projects now or EPIC projects.

Gowen:

They are. But you think of that evolution. When you sit here and you say, “What is the Foundation,” I’m just describing the way the Foundation grew. Fortunately, we had Leah because she had been engaged in the academic community and had helped build the academic side at Purdue. And then, as that evolved, it was easy to take that model and move that over to wherever it needed to be. We’re moving along IEEE.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Regarding the IEEE Foundation, what I found interesting is that they have their four Signature Programs, but they are a small staff. Yet, they try to cover so many projects.

Gowen:

A wide area.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Recently, I heard there is an IEEE Foundation in India, a separate group there, and a Foundation in Canada.

Gowen:

Yes, there is.

Hellrigel:

That makes sense because of all of the different laws and regulations, and in India a much different culture and context.

Gowen:

Ultimately, there will be--in the big Regions you’re going to have so you have India. You are very close to China.

China

Hellrigel:

China?

Gowen:

China has the IEEE office in China. It is an excellent run management group.

Hellrigel:

I was checking out IEEE membership development. China is growing. India is growing. In terms of where I watch membership, the tipping point was maybe about 1980 or so, that now more than 50 percent of IEEE members are outside the U.S.

Gowen:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

China is growing.

Gowen:

It’s been funny to see China grow because, generally speaking, the leadership of the Sections that existed turned their back upon adding additional Sections.

Hellrigel:

Oh, in China they didn’t want expansion?

Gowen:

In China, they didn’t want any competition. But then what happened there was a Section that caught on that it could basically keep pushing China. It pushed China and pushed China to the point where they sort of said, “We’ll do a pilot.” Well, that was Katie Barthedor [name is unclear]. The Section overnight grew 100 percent and then it grew another 100 percent. Suddenly, you have got a major computer section.

Hellrigel:

Oh, computers.

Gowen:

It’s computers. China has just continued to grow and the office in Beijing grew as well. When we were doing the humanitarian side, they were very interested in us because, they knew that I’m vocal.

Hellrigel:

[Humanitarian activities] in China?

Gowen:

I will tell the story. We went to China, and we did the humanitarian side. They said, “Now, we want to take you somewhere else.” There is a city in China that is known for its gardens and its flowers and all of that. And Nancy, when-- there’s so many diversions here. We were in China, back when we were doing the centennial.

Hellrigel:

Okay, back in 1984.

Gowen:

In 1984, China was bragging about its ability to do things that were extraordinary. There was a group in China that said that it could do things like it could write a letter, an alphabetic letter, and roll that up and put it in the ear of a child in China, and they’ll tell you what the letter is. Hmm, interesting.

Hellrigel:

Child, a person?

Gowen:

Now, I’m going to share with you a slice of things that are not classified. What we were interested in is what were the capabilities of China and what were our capabilities? Seeing the extraordinary things you can do is a part of what I’ve been involved with, and it was done through IEEE.

For instance, we went ahead and did an experiment, in which we gave you a location to go to and to describe what was at that location. Then, another team separated intentionally, we had them receive what you sent. So, you were going to go someplace, and you were going to say, “I’m in a shopping mall and you told me to go to this GPS and the name of the store is such-and-such.” So that specific information was put together and ultimately it was collated. The place that was doing this is a little unusual; it was Stanford Research Center.

Stanford Research Center said, “Nah, we don’t want anything to do with this.” We came back to them, and we said, “Well, if it’s kooky, why don’t you prove it’s kooky? Why don’t you show what’s wrong?” Stanford said, “That’s an interesting piece.” So, the executive team at Stanford came together and said, “This is craziness. We’re going to show that it is, so we’ll do that.” Well, it turned out that it was 60 plus percent that you could have told and predicted where the person was, and then you had a prediction that was correct.

Hellrigel:

This was by using GPS technology?

Gowen:

No, it was by using computer technology.

Hellrigel:

Oh, computer technology, okay.

Gowen:

What you had is a computer that you had gotten instructions [from regarding] where you wanted to go with. Then you have a computer where the results are coming in. Then you matched the two and it’s a 60 percent plus positive. The numbers were actually above 60 percent. We had them present it to IEEE in meetings. We took it around and said, “Well, who is that strange guy? He’s a researcher out of Stanford, so that was one.”

Then that is where we started looking at what we can learn. We caught on that China was bragging about what it could do. So, when I went to China and part of my field of interest, there were key codewords that we put in, knowing that in China the people who had an interest in this would read the key codewords and contact me, which they did. There was a convention meeting I talked at, and then on the side this came through. There were people in the convention that said, “No, don’t do that. We don’t want anybody to think that China is strange.” We worked the system, and we were there for a little over two weeks, so it took time to get connected.

Hellrigel:

Right, right.

Gowen:

One day a bus appeared. Okay? They were going to take me somewhere, so I went. There were sixteen of us. I went to the group, and I took a person who was on the staff of the naval research lab. I said, “Come with me. I’m going to show you something.” They didn’t know what I was doing, and nobody knew that this was going on, so he got on the bus with me, and we rode for a while. When we got off the bus, we were in a military compound and there were armed guards. Now we were accompanied by armed guards to go in, and we met with the director. The director very ceremoniously told us, “What you are asking for is not what this institute does. So, this is not something we work on.”

Then they took us out to the researchers. The researchers were in a very difficult position because here is somebody distinguished from outside, who is asking them, “Did you have the effect that when you gave somebody a specific item and they activated the item, you could detect that they activated it?” That was the story we were checking. You can probably picture where that story came from. It’s called Washington, but it was a segment of Washington because you build up contacts with people. So, we said, “Well, could we see how you do this?”

They did it in a way in which we went to this hotel, and we have a group of people that come in from China. They’re going to show us what they can do.

One in the group was looking at healing, and Nancy was having trouble, so they worked Nancy. Now, Nancy is a believer that they helped her. They did something, it came together. We had a group that was working on how you could basically know that these people could modify something? Could you give them, in effect, a piece that they would modify, like change it and break it? It was that kind of a case. I had the person from the naval group there with me, so there were two of us that knew what was going on, and we didn’t have anybody else in the room except these people.

Hellrigel:

This was in 1984. Tensions are a little high.

Gowen:

Yes. But we’re skating on ice. So, he went home, and he did this with his daughter. He called me back and said, “Dick, there’s something wrong here.” Then he did it again and he called me back and said, “There’s really something wrong. It’s working.” Then he called me back and he said, “My daughter refuses to do it again because she’s very uncomfortable with how this functions.” She was old enough that she understood what was going on. We sort of looked at the idea, could we put together a contingent and get into China and do this. We were advised, “Well, you may end up staying in China.”

Hellrigel:

Yes. You might be an extended guest.

Gowen:

Yes. We never went down that route because then we had other intelligence that came in that gave us other input.

Hellrigel:

Oh, that would have created a problem for the IEEE Centennial celebrations.

Gowen:

Well, it was actually after.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay, because the President of IEEE being detained would be a problem.

Gowen:

Oh, no, no. This was following the centennial. Oh, yes, it would have.

Hellrigel:

That would have been a problem.

Gowen:

It was and the IEEE leadership had sort of approved my piece, but they didn’t catch the words. The people in China got the words.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes.

Gowen:

So, it went through IEEE. And for that delegation my clearance piece for China was a very simple clearance piece, Lieutenant Colonel Air Force.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay.

Gowen:

That’s all it said. The other people said what university they were in because they were monitoring, and they had a full file.

Hellrigel:

Got it, a full file, on you?

Gowen:

On me, and the rest of the group didn’t matter. So, it was one of those situations where we were going to the nth new mausoleum or whatever, and we were getting all of that. And there was one that we went to, and we discovered that this was a well-developed plan. We found out that the Chinese were now making complete monitors, and this was 1984.

Hellrigel:

1984? Monitors to do what?

Gowen:

Computers.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Gowen:

They hadn’t--

Hellrigel:

All our [IEEE staff] computers were Dell?

Gowen:

They got them from China. They bought them out of Japan. So, Japan provided the ability to make glass to the point where you could then sell ultimate or, as China did, it passed it around, a finished monitor that was first class.

When you think about that, we did not know about that in the general way, and there was great interest in the fact that this existed. So, from an IEEE point of view, you are a delegate of IEEE, and you are working in an area that is of great interest potentially to IEEE, the humanitarian effort and what you do with that.

But the peripheral side, so the fact that we were visiting as a delegation in the time of the centennial year, and we were going around China giving awards because what we were doing in China. We gave an award in Beijing and I’m getting ready to give the award and to talk about it, so I’m taking tabs of who’s in the room. What I ended up with is if you blew this room up the electronics industry in China will have suffered.

Hellrigel:

It would have went with the explosion.

Gowen:

Will have suffered because you had all the leaders.

Hellrigel:

Yes, of the electronics industry.

Gowen:

IEEE was giving an award, and the award was a recognition to the leaders. So, what I did, all the major companies in China were brought in and we gave them awards on behalf of the IEEE for your technology development. So, that’s what this was about. This was an effort of recognizing Japan and China, and all the countries around. So, when we were in Japan, we could have blown up the industry in China. We were there and this was the developing industry of electronics in China.

Hellrigel:

These were government owned companies at that point?

Gowen:

In China they were government owned. In Japan they were companies that were economic. All of that is a part of the background we had in the centennial year.

Hellrigel:

In Japan, they were investor owned, a capitalist economy.

Gowen:

You were recognizing the members of IEEE for what the hundred years were of development. This was a century of development, so we were out telling people what they achieved. We had a little spiel, thanking them and congratulating the companies and all of that. It was great in Japan. In China, when I looked around in China, China was just beginning. You were talking to the government leadership, and they were not companies. Were they interested in doing companies? No, they were going to develop the technology as China.

You had such a difference within miles of each other and of attitudes of how this was done because we visited to Japan, and we visited China and there was such a change.

When you think about IEEE, we have such a dimensional capability that when you go to people, and you help them realize because they know it’s one thing to do it when I’m talking one-on-one and it’s another thing to do it when the room is full of all of the leaders. You congratulate what everybody does. They know it. The President of IEEE is coming and anointing them and that is what they are expecting.

Hellrigel:

To recognize them.

Gowen:

Yes. It’s a recognition. Those are the functions of the leadership of IEEE. We are interested in what the [IEEE] President’s interests are and where they’re going because the Presidents basically fill in their schedule, so that makes IEEE special.

When I look at the Foundation, the Foundation has a very unique role in IEEE because it collects money. It is different than IEEE of course because it has the charter to be able to collect money. When you collect the money, then you have to decide what you’re going to do with it. If you’re going to then give it as donations inward, and then send that out to serve projects, you create another expectation of the organization called IEEE. The Foundation does that.

It is accepted and particularly if it leads to Signature Programs, or it leads to changes around the world. So, when you look at the IEEE Foundation, the IEEE Foundation serves a special role. It enables IEEE to serve in the world that is taking care of the needs of people.

Relationship between IEEE and IEEE Foundation

Hellrigel:

But it also then allows the Foundation to do it. Did you see any bickering within IEEE proper about what’s the proper role of IEEE or was this not an issue because the Foundation is a separate entity.

Gowen:

It’s not an issue. The IEEE Foundation is growing to be able to be there and to represent the best interests of IEEE in serving the needs of humanity. This is a key issue of the IEEE Foundation. Back when we made the change, we were looking at what was going on. There wasn’t a lot of recognition or going out and supporting IEEE.

Hellrigel:

Globally?

Gowen:

It was something that you sort of talked about, but you had no mechanisms. So, when we started building the Foundation, it became important to find the right people to come in and to basically build the right mechanisms to make this work and that took a while. When I turned over the Foundation to Leah [Jamieson], I turned it over with the expectation that it was ready to go, but so was Leah, because she understood. She got it. She understood what she needed to do, and then just went in and continually built the aspect of Signature Programs, and then built who is managing the Signature Programs. So, you have teams of volunteers managing the Signature Programs, and basically managing where the money goes. When I look at the development of the energy aspect to get to the point where your Signature Programs are promoting the energy side and you’re doing that, so that the money comes in not necessarily to staff. It flows through staff.

Hellrigel:

Right, right.

Gowen:

But the staff isn’t making the decision of where the money goes. The volunteers who are running the Signature Programs are making that decision, and that’s a major effort of giving independence to the IEEE Foundation. By that activity, giving independence to how the IEEE is, IEEE has got a strange element. It’s got democracy. The Foundation provides an element of democracy that the corporate IEEE enjoys, but doesn’t have to get engaged in. You have a separation of a corporation called the IEEE, and a foundation called the IEEE Foundation that is legally separated and can function in an entirely different way than IEEE itself functions. You achieve the goal of IEEE as an organization serving humanity all around the globe.

Hellrigel:

Does IEEE itself give money to the Foundation?

Gowen:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Because that’s part of the nonprofit, I mean sort of the corporate or the identity as a nonprofit?

Gowen:

Well, what happens is that IEEE historically staffs the IEEE Foundation, so it paid for the staff. Then, as money started coming in, there was money to basically pay for the operating expenses of the Foundation, including the staff. Then the money that was available went into programs. That’s where we had the money to go out and provide money to programs around the world to do humanitarian good things. That’s how that started. That’s where the funding came in. It was funding that very early on paid for the Foundation, but once we started collecting money, we just changed what the money was and had money now that you could do it. Those were the early days of financially supporting the activity. It was until the Societies said if they wanted to put money in the bank it was beneath the radar. Then, as soon as it happened, now it was open, everything was above board, so the Board of Directors began to ask questions about our budget and the Foundation. Where did it come from? Who gave you the money? It became an open book, and it was good for the Foundation because ultimately there wasn’t any hidden asset. Members of the IEEE Board who were after us basically got everything laid out, and some of those members became our best advocates. You went through a period, as IEEE often does, that when people see the value of what you’re doing, they join the club. It’s been good.

Hellrigel:

The Societies will give money to IEEE Foundation because it’s part of their nonprofit?

Gowen:

If they give money to the IEEE Foundation, it has to go through the Board of Directors. It has to be money that the Society has convinced members of the Board that it’s okay to give this money to the Foundation because what you’re doing is you’re convincing the Board that you can take money, you can put it in the bank, and the Board can’t get it. You’ve got to basically convince people that there is good reason and what you end up with is Signature Programs. You can see then that it is on behalf of the Signature Programs, a part of TAB. Basically, it’s the Signature Program leaders who are now out going to the Board and telling them why they want their money to go to the village. It’s a subtlety, but it’s a very important.

Hellrigel:

Yes, it’s a little bit of a maze. You’ve got to connect the dots.

Gowen:

When you connect the dots and the Board of Directors are comfortable with how the dots are connected, lots of good things happen. So, that’s where the Foundation is today. It’s clear in the sense that the money flow is very clear,

and the reason that the money should flow is the Signature Programs. But what are they doing? They’re doing the humanitarian.

So, what are they doing? They’re basically representing the IEEE and going out and helping the world. It gives the IEEE what the IEEE needs, but it does it in a very special way, in that they’re not competing with what Society money is. They are using the Society money to achieve the purposes that IEEE wants to achieve. The Foundation has grown to be a very significant operation, not necessarily by how many hours you’ve got to spend because, in effect, you’re now taking the Signature Programs, which are auditing the programs, and you’re passing those before the staff of the Foundation, and the Foundation is just validating that this is the way it works.

Hellrigel:

What do you think are some of the most significant accomplishments of the Foundation?

Gowen:

Leah [Jamieson] worked with the Board of Directors to work with the Signature Programs and made it so that the Signature Programs that the Foundation are doing are really the programs IEEE wants to do. To me, in my mind, when I look at what’s here, that’s the most significant management piece that has been done in the Foundation. Now, we did the precursor to that. I’m not sure we would have been bold enough to do what Leah did. I give credit to a lot of people who brought this together. Yes, I was back at the beginning, but as you went through the process it got rocky. When Leah came in, there was a new kid on the block and a fresh voice. She could go into the Board and say, “Oh, we can do this, this, this,” and it worked.

Hellrigel:

It was rocky because the IEEE Board was critical?

Gowen:

The IEEE Board was worried about the Societies taking their money instead of giving it to the Foundation. The Board of Directors were basically saying to me, “Dick, you can’t take that money,” because if the Foundation took the money all they could do is raise conniptions about it. We had the ability, so when Leah came in and activated that, that was a significant capability.

Hellrigel:

At this point, this is after she’s IEEE President or before she’s president?

Gowen:

While she was starting as IEEE President because the key was here is the new kid on the block, so to speak. It’s a new leader, and this new leader is offering you a different aspect than the old leader offered you, so you got a chance. Now, the fact that it had been talked and worked and all of that, but it wasn’t what was visible.

Hellrigel:

That hasn’t gone public yet.

Gowen:

Yes. It didn’t go to the Board. It was important that Leah go to the Board, not me, because they had heard me, and I had given money from the Societies to the Foundation.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Gowen:

They necessarily didn’t have a high level of trust that I would do their bidding. So, when Leah came in and offered to do their bidding and bring it together, and--

Hellrigel:

Do the IEEE Board’s bidding?

Gowen:

Yes. The Board of Directors’ bidding, the people. IEEE is a people organization, so there were people on the Board of Directors who spoke vociferously about don’t let the Foundation--

Hellrigel:

Don’t let the Foundation do X, Y, or Z.

Gowen:

Just get the money. The Board of Directors doesn’t know what’s going on as a whole.

Hellrigel:

Leah assured them that she had their interests at heart?

Gowen:

Yes, because the people who were there were taking the position that the Foundation doesn’t have the best interest [of IEEE] at heart. They’re taking the Society money. Okay? The Societies are sort of in bed with the Foundation

Hellrigel:

So, they’re fracturing the [IEEE] structure.

Gowen:

Yes. And because we would go to all the Board meetings, the Society leadership would track us down and they were making an offer. They were going to put their money in the Foundation, if we would agree to do X, Y, or Z. And very bluntly, I knew that if I didn’t agree, we’d never get that money.

Hellrigel:

You were being lobbied?

Gowen:

Oh, tremendously. And the lobbying was the money. So, it’s IEEE at its finest. It’s the members of IEEE working with each other. Ultimately, the Board sits over there and sort of has a whistle that it can blow if it isn’t working as the way the Board should see that it would work. So, it’s IEEE at its best.

When Leah came in, the Board was saying, “Hmm, so what are you going to do? We saw what Gowen did. He got the money flowing in and the IEEE Foundation had its money. But it wasn’t necessarily the way we could see that we wanted to be.” They didn’t know about the programs. Nothing was on the table. It had all been structured behind the scenes. We knew that the four programs could work. They’d all been lined up. There was agreement amongst the people. They wanted to do this because they could see the advantage to IEEE. If IEEE was now able to go out and talk about how they were doing the four Signature Programs, then the Societies could work through the Signature Programs and get their money put away where they wanted it.

The Societies were advocates of doing what Leah was doing. It’s a set of meetings, discussions, and people talking about where they could go and how they could do it behind the scenes. Then you have the power to go out and go where the people are, and work with them because you’re doing what they want to do. So, the Board of Directors could then get the credit and move where it is. That’s ten years ago, so this didn’t just happen.

Hellrigel:

That’s the politics, giving the Board of Directors the credit.

Gowen:

It happened. When Leah ultimately did her term, that was old history at that point because we had been had the Board doing it for five years or plus. That’s how IEEE can be very successful.

Hellrigel:

Are there any roads that the Foundation should have taken or some projects they should have taken, that they didn’t do?

Gowen:

The aspect of building the Signature Programs was an interesting challenge because when you talk about trying to take and move to, in many cases, India in particular, but to go out to where people needed electricity, and to figure out how could you get people with a return on the investment. The first trailers were made were not the leading edge because you went out and, I don’t know, I think it was forty units that could be charged up solarized. You could get one of those units and you would rent the unit. You were paying for making the electricity that you were going to use. That’s an interesting piece. Around the world, you got to put it into terms of how the local people work. Getting that done was a major piece of getting the Signature units started because once you started it you could show that it monetarily was good. Then you now said, “Well, we did that here, but could we do this over here? Could we do this?” So, it just began to wildfire expand.

Fundraising, not-for-profit status

Hellrigel:

Did you find that you had to have lawyers all over where you wanted to do these programs? For example, when you wanted to bring a program into India, you got the technical challenge and you raised the money, but did you have to deal with local legal problems and barriers?

Gowen:

You weren’t big enough that lawyers were interested in you.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay. It’s still small scale enough you weren’t attracting too much attention?

Gowen:

Yes. If you brought in forty charging units, you basically had one prototype you were sending, and then you refine that. You brought in next time maybe one hundred charging units, so you were taking a narrow sliver and you were doing this to it. You were making it grow because people in the region realized that that’s a business. If I can get in that business, I can make money and people are going to be happy. It’s that normal process of how do you basically grow businesses. Everybody around the world wants to grow a successful business, so we had to teach them. The people who were putting on the programs in the electrical area in the early days would go out and they were forming corporations. They were having a devil of a time forming the corporation to basically get the money. So, what they discovered is that if they didn’t basically build a corporation, or backdoored it in order to get it to come together, it took off

Hellrigel:

The nonprofit versus a money revenue?

Gowen:

Well, it was a nonprofit at the core, but it was a money revenue at the operation.

Hellrigel:

At the front.

Gowen:

Because a nonprofit doesn’t make money.

Hellrigel:

Right because it has no profit.

Gowen:

It has no profit, but if you make it a for profit unit, managed through the nonprofit, it’s the standard model. You’ve got a nonprofit that’s providing the service it takes in order to get a company that’s going to make money then ultimately gets somebody else to join you. Now the company grows, so the nonprofit doesn’t have to grow. It just provides the teaching and the management.

Hellrigel:

The management?

Gowen:

In those early days there’s, I don’t know if I could find it, but IEEE probably has it somewhere. It’s what the attempts were to build a nonprofit because the nonprofit kept getting in the way of the for profit. You couldn’t build a nonprofit that was going to make money.

Hellrigel:

Right, that’s a problem.

Gowen:

Inherently, it doesn’t; a nonprofit is a nonprofit. Once they caught onto that, then they were in a position to basically open it up as something you could buy or rent. Once you could get to the point where you could buy it, that created companies. If you could buy this and you could get the money because you’ve made money. If you’re making money on that company, then somebody wants to make money on you. You’ve got to catch onto that. Once you catch onto it, then you can get money. So, that’s how this continued to grow.

IEEE Foundation philanthropic programs

Hellrigel:

They did this with electricity. Do you see any other new program they might--

Gowen:

I was not as close to the rest, but what you end up with is that you do it in a way that--and the electrical utility is the furthest out. It’s the furthest thing.

Leah is number two because what she did is she went out and educated the students to recognize the value of building a nonprofit, and how the engine of having a corporation works would go. That’s what Leah did. She didn’t worry about getting into the for profit side. She just let the students see how they came, and then get out of the way.

Hellrigel:

It’s theirs?

Gowen:

It’s theirs, and they will begin to go soon. She helped the copper, the real money side come down closer to where the students are. I’m blocking the other two. What are the other two?

Hellrigel:

Oh, well, we got the REACH program [Raising Engineering Awareness Through the Conduit of History], the pre-university education program.

Gowen:

Yes. The IEEE Foundation inspires donations to IEEE. It manages donations for IEEE and invests in programs of IEEE. And then the, the fourth one is--let’s see.

Hellrigel:

The global village; not the global village.

Gowen:

IEEE Smart Village.

Hellrigel:

Yes, Smart Village, that’s it.

Gowen:

Yes. IEEE, EPICS [Engineering Projects in Community Service], and IEEE. The EPICS side is enabling students to envision development and technological solutions, so that’s sort of the very important major part. But it’s like, again, helping our students move. So, IEEE and the award winning international [inaudible], so PES [IEEE Power and Energy Society]. It’s a major one of our EPICS.

PES is an interesting story because Wanda Reder came in and approached me and said, “Can you help us be able to go out and get people who can now work in power?” IEEE is looking at, through our corporations, roughly 10,000 people are needed, so how can you get 10,000 people? Wanda talked about a scholarship program. She said, “Will the IEEE Foundation help us build a scholarship program?” So, we spent time just talking about what do you need to do that. We talked about how could you go back to PES and get PES to go out to its companies and, in effect, put money aside for scholarships. They would put sponsor money into the scholarship fund, and then create scholarships managed through PES. So, PES would build the capability to collect the money and put it in the Foundation, and then spend the money the Foundation has for scholarships.

Hellrigel:

Right. I think it is $7,000 at the undergraduate level.

Gowen:

It is. Typical a scholarship is $7,000. What they would do with that is they would develop the universities. We discovered the question was who did you give the money to? Did you give the money to the universities? And would they use it only to provide scholarships? It was a question that was debated. The recognition was if you gave the money to the students, the universities have to work with the students to get the money, so that was the answer.

Hellrigel:

My fear would be if you give it to a university, how much of it would go into overhead and how much would go to the student.

Gowen:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

How much would trickle down. But, here, the $7,000, that’s a sizable scholarship and then maybe it could also be worked into an internship. For example, maybe it could provide funding to the student if they had an unpaid internship. I’ve met Wanda. She’s very dynamic. She just started her own company.

Gowen:

Yes. I was going to tell you that, yes.

Hellrigel:

Yes, but she is very dynamic. For a while power wasn’t as “spicy” a field as computers, or cybersecurity or whatever.

Gowen:

But it merged enough with computers that you can sell power. On the university campus you basically have a company or part of the university as a company that’s engaged in looking at how do you use technology and a major effort on using technology as opposed to being in the management because a lot of the students said, “I want to go into business.” And you’re not necessarily high technology is an interest, but it’s a secondary interest. If you go in and so working all of those structures the PES--and so the development of people in PES becomes an element of who the faculty are. And the faculty basically have to sell power.

Hellrigel:

I think the fellow’s name is Dan [Toland] who works with the PES scholarships.

Gowen:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I met him at the [IEEE] Foundation training. It is a training program where they brought in an outside training company and the Foundation tried to remind its people that you connect with people by telling stories, so, don’t go in and dump a bunch of facts on them. Tell them a story and build up the human side of it.

Gowen:

You’ve discovered in our talking I tell a lot of stories.

Hellrigel:

Oh yes, Well, that’s life; it’s stories.

Gowen:

It gives you the perspective because you take a story or you take another story, and the difference in our discussions here is we’re doing this long term. It’s a day.

Hellrigel:

Right, right. If you make a pitch for something, you could tell someone how many this and that, but it gets dry. If you have a story, a human element, it is something to connect with. There was a one-day meeting at 3 Park Avenue that I was invited because I helped with one of the donors in Cleveland, Tom Peterson. Storytelling is what historians do, so it is not that alienating for us. But I said to them the money part is different. How do you ask for the donation? They were trying to explain it to me, and I forget the proper term for it. Maybe the term is “the ask.”

Gowen:

Fundraising.

Hellrigel:

Yes, the fundraising end of it is something that is an art.

Gowen:

It is an art and the people who are very good at it raised some money. When I told you about Crazy Horse there are five of us that in various ways understand raising the money and spending the money. I serve in a capacity for the steering group that I have a strong root in Crazy Horse. For Crazy Horse they know I know what they do, so I’m on the Board of Crazy Horse, but I’m not active on the internal group that’s managing the needs for Crazy Horse because I’m going to go out and sell their story. They want me to have the latest story, so they want to slow it down before they have to tell me. But we’re now in the process in which it’s time to go out and ask for money, so there’s no slowdown. It’s now.

Hellrigel:

Right. You are the President Emeritus of the IEEE Foundation. Are you still active with the Foundation?

Gowen:

I’ve been to the Board meetings, so I’ll go in. This Foundation meeting, I didn’t respond to, but we’re looking at going to the next Foundation meeting. So, excuse me to go into this, but there’s another rule that I live by. When you are the past, get out of the way of today. I tend to watch the leaders and I don’t criticize leaders in a public way.

Hellrigel:

Oh, no. Yes, that’s essential.

Gowen:

I’ll go to the Foundation, and I’ll spend time with them. Then, when we go to dinner or wherever--

Hellrigel:

Then you chat?

Gowen:

Then I chitchat, but I always do it personally. I never put anybody at risk because I’m trying to be the old dog.

Hellrigel:

Right. Sometimes I’ve worked with people that get into email wars or silly things like that, instead of just going to talk about it. The miscommunication can get really intense. Sometimes, just going down the hallway and having a chat resolves the issue with less stress and chaos.

Gowen:

I had an opportunity. The civic center is called the Barnett Arena. That Barnett, [Don Barnett] was a mayor of the city. He built and he guided the civic center. We’re going to build a new one. We don’t have a name for it yet. The gentleman who was the mayor was on the board of the Hall of Fame. One of my activities, I just stepped down as the president of the Hall of Fame.

South Dakota Hall of Fame

Hellrigel:

The South Dakota Inventors Hall of Fame?

Gowen:

No, the South Dakota Hall of Fame. It’s a board of sixteen people. The purpose for the board is to--and the mission changed. When they asked me to come on the board, I said, “No, you don’t need me. You can elect ten people to be inductees to the Hall of Fame, and you’ll elect ten good people. You don’t need me to do that.” The gentleman who was coming in as the president said, “What do you really want to do?” I said, “Well, let me tell you a story.” When I left the Air Force Academy, we did research for putting people in space. I had material that is in the Smithsonian. All of that was very good.

I came here to School of Mines and was visiting with the people. One of your people who was engaged as a department head sort of quietly took me into a corner and said to me, “What did you do wrong, because why did you come here?” I was aghast. I didn’t know how to handle that because that’s not where I came from. It caused me to think through [ and] stamp out South Dakota’s disease. I went on a private campaign that when I would be with somebody, I was thinking how do I take what that person has because they lived in South Dakota, and how do I stamp out the South Dakota disease so they will rise.

So, I started then, and I answered the gentleman who was the president. I said, “I want to change the feeling in South Dakota. I want to champion a culture of excellence, so that’s what I want to do.” He said, “Well, that’s ambitious. Why not?” The two of us agreed to change the mission of the South Dakota Hall of Fame over dinner. Then we went back, and we worked the other members to champion a culture of excellence. Who is against that?

We ultimately changed the mission of the South Dakota Hall of Fame. Then you can probably guess what I did. They needed a way. We had two staff people, but two staff people couldn’t do that. I had had experience with building a piece of software, so they got a Wiki. Finally, I said my donation to the South Dakota Hall of Fame is to fund the development of a Wiki. Basically, it took, oh, it became really operational in two years, but within a year I had a Wiki that was functional. One of the Wiki’s is an Act of Excellence.

Act of Excellence, so just let your mind think of what that is. You’re a person who lives in society and you see lots of things in the newspaper or you hear it on the radio. How do you share an act of excellence? What you do is you have a form, and you go in, and you basically describe what you saw as an Act of Excellence.

When we were doing ICPC, we were sitting in a restaurant and one of the members of the team started to choke. The food was lodged in the windpipe, so we were just gathering and didn’t know what to do. The maître de woman came over and did the Heimlich maneuver and the food [came] out. We came together, no big discussion, do an Act of Excellence. I don’t know. We must have 100, 150 Acts of Excellence that are now available on the Internet. Describe an Act of Excellence and people can look at it and you’re putting in their mind what you can do.

We also have a legacy of achievement. If you’re on the board or if you’re a person who has been inducted and a legacy, when you were inducted, we put some words out. Now go back and make a Wiki that in effect tells all you’ve done, so it’s your legacy and you can put it out. It’s promoting people, same story. But you do it and people will be interested. If you go to the grandparents and give them the password or give it to their grandchildren, they’ll go in and they’ll build a legacy of achievement. You just think of what we are and then put it together and make it work.

Developing the Hall of Fame, it promotes education. It has legends of learning in which you take people who have [an achievement]. We have a Native American who won at the Olympics. He [Billy Mills] was an orphan, and he was encouraged and supported to become a runner, so he won. He won the Olympics. [Mills won a gold medal in the 10,000 meters at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.] How did he win it? He developed in fortitude. So, we take people like that. [Tom] Brokaw is a South Dakotan, and we promote what Brokaw has done. We do all of this, and we invite kids. Fourth grade is where South Dakota history is taught, so we go to the teachers, and they have something that they can turn over to the kids. The kids will develop some spark in history. That’s what we do in the Hall of Fame. That all came together, and then there’s another effort that became interesting. There is a program that exists around the world of basically proving who is the best coder in the world. Who can provide the best software?

Hellrigel:

Competition?

Gowen:

It’s a series of competitions that typically a 30,000 to 40,000 student university competes for. You compete and you get your opportunity to basically three years in advance, come in and start building this program. Two of our faculty here [at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology] became engaged in this operation as leaders in providing programs. Basically, if you’re going to compete, you have to have something that’s a question. They developed and became part of the judge’s group that in effect you make up a problem. Then the program is typically ten problems to twelve problems. You have to do that in five hours, so you sit in a room, and you go in for one day and practice a little bit. Then for real, you go in and it gets real. You can’t pick up a pencil until the start. You sit there and you have no idea what the problems are going to be. You look at previous problems. That’s your best effort, but you don’t know today’s problems. The program starts and three person teams are competing for the ability to brag that your university is the best in the world because it prepares coders. That’s what this is about.

The faculty, three faculty, sort of went to the leadership of the ICPC [Association of Computer Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest] and said, “Come to Rapid City and put your program in.” They were fascinated, by the way, that you’ve seen Rapid City. So, they came here, and they decided “Let’s offer it, if Rapid City can bring it together.” They offered to bring the International Collegiate Program here instead of a 30,000 or 40,000 student university, 20,000 students. I mean, yes, 20,000 across the state, but 2,000 students at the School of Mines.

I didn’t know that they had come into town because we were traveling. We got a luncheon invitation and went out to the country club and Tony and Ed were there. They said, “Let us buy you lunch. We want to ask you a question. You’ve been a university president. Why won’t today’s university president agree to accept this invitation?” I said, “If I was still president, I’d have to tell you no.” And he said, “What do you mean you’d have to tell us no?” I said, “You don’t have the capacity to do this. You don’t have people. You’re not like a large university. You don’t have buses. You don’t have things in there. You can’t do it.”

I said, “Well, is there any way you can think of doing it? I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll go talk with the president and see what she wants to do.” So, I got together with the president. She says, “Well, I’d like to do this, but there’s no way I can see doing it.” I said, “I understand.” We talked and she said, “Why don’ you go to Russia and go to Ekaterinburg, and see how they’re doing this? See if you think there’s a way we could do it.” So, we went to Ekaterinburg, Nancy and I, along with a team from here. It was a 50/50 in which I could see why you would want to do this, but I could also see why industry would want to do this. When you look at our ability to compete with the other countries, which country would you think is the country that wins the gold medal each year?

Hellrigel:

China?

Gowen:

No. China is trying to get there, but it doesn’t.

Hellrigel:

India?

Gowen:

It’s way back in the mind.

Hellrigel:

USA?

Gowen:

Five times out of thirty there’s a country that won the gold medal and there’s three universities: Moscow University, St. Petersburg University, and another university in Moscow. They are the winning team. In the last eighteen years, there’s four gold medals given. This group of teams have won the gold medals thirty times.

Hellrigel:

Oh my, all is Russia.

Gowen:

In the early days when it was just getting started, we used to win, but we haven’t won anything in recent times. We’ve won five times.

Hellrigel:

Where does Japan sit?

Gowen:

It is a contender, and it comes in. You could go out to the ICPC and look on the website. You will find it interesting if you see who you think would be there and who were there. What Russia does is that it’s a quarantine setup. You start early, so think of sports and think of music. You learn when you get interested in it. Then you really dedicate time to it. Think of the people who dedicate time to music and ultimately get to play in the symphony. Think of the people who are the athletes. They start early. They kick a ball around and ultimately, they get out and play, and they get beat up a little bit. Well, they learn, so competition is vital.

What we’re doing is the 50 percent; why don’t I help build the network to do what industry needs? So, that led me into really looking to get the ICPC here, to prove that Rapid City could do something. You can talk about it, but unless you can prove it, you don’t exist. [The 2017 ACM ICPC World Finals contest was held in Rapid City, South Dakota on 20-25 May 2017.] We had 133 teams of three people each that ultimately competed in our civic center. We arranged booths. We built a whole arena.

Hellrigel:

You had about 400 competitors?

Gowen:

Yes, by the time we had 400, but it was a little closer to 500 for the extra people who were there in case they needed to be. It ended up that you had to get a visa to come here, so in the environment we are in, to think about getting visas you had to show you will go home.

Hellrigel:

Exactly, yes.

Gowen:

If you couldn’t convince the visa officer in the local visa that you were part of, so you were--you needed to be correct and you needed to basically do it. Later the students are excited about coming and they don’t really think about going home. Some of the teams had two and three tries to convince the people to come. There was one country that the State Department [U.S. Department of State] basically told us you’re not going to get.

Hellrigel:

Iran?

Gowen:

No.

Hellrigel:

North Korea?

Gowen:

Syria. It’s too unstable. It has too many different battles and--

Hellrigel:

No one is going to want to go home.

Gowen:

No one is going to want to go home. That was an interesting piece. We had the contest. Nancy and 250 volunteers. We had volunteers and the people on the ICPC said, “Can you send any volunteers home because you’re swamping us and you’re way ahead.” It was an excellent contest. This year it is in Beijing. One of the teams was out of Russia this year. It’s an interesting piece because what we proved is that we can do some things on a large scale. Now what I’m doing is I have to work with the programs, to be able to have something to give to a person in order to do coding so that they can learn to do coding. There are a lot of coding programs around. So, we have locked into our developing a program called Code Down to Work. You may have heard of it, Code Down to Work.

Hellrigel:

No.

Gowen:

It covers pre-reading through graduation at a high school. It is fifteen different programs, and it provides a recorded program where there’s a teacher that talks with a group of students and teaches the group of students how to code. Now, you want to develop coding, so here you’ve got a program that you can go back and turn on again and turn on again. We are in the process of trying to figure out how do we promote this locally, then nationally, and then internationally. Quietly, the question is can we beat the Russians. So, that’s another program, and that’s what the board is in this room is doing.

Nonprofits and foundations

Hellrigel:

So, you continue to work with a lot of nonprofits and foundations?

Gowen:

Yes. I worked an interesting piece in which I had a dad come in and ask me if he could buy a child’s bike motor.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Gowen:

I was running a program for the Air Force, and we were doing research and we were not selling anything through the Air Force.

Hellrigel:

Selling motors for bicycles?

Gowen:

What we ended up with is there were two brothers, so we basically built identical bikes. We took a Chinese bike and then we bought two versions of the Chinese bike. We took the motor out of the second one and we put our motor in it. The best motors are permanent magnet motors, and China has an 80 percent market on permanent magnet motors. We gave the two bikes to the two boys. We were functional out here west of town. So, we just said, “Tell us how the bikes work.” We didn’t tell them anymore and our engineers just stood back and watched. The boys are going to fight for what they consider the best, so what we wanted was which bike did they fight over. They fought over ours. So, I went over to Brussels and to a meeting of people who were concerned about basically doing strategic [planning] to make sure that China couldn’t control our motors. I told them the story, and one of the department heads who was there said “What were your metrics?”

Hellrigel:

The metrics?

Gowen:

I just started to laugh, and the room kind of picked up on it. I said, “You ever have boys?”

Hellrigel:

Yes. Two boys, here’s a toy.

Gowen:

Those are pieces that are out there. When I’m talking about where does this go, it’s a flavor of IEEE. So, if you look at the thread through what I’m sharing with you, I’m sharing with you people. I’m sharing with you competition. And what I’m sharing with you is that how do you basically move ahead by working on competition and making the advantages. In effect, that’s the story I’ve been telling you. I made Maze-Mastering Mouse, and basically had to struggle with learning how to do that because I was using “if/and” statements. I learned how to use “if/and” statements adequately enough that you could do something with them. That led to RCA, and that led to the Air Force Academy, and it led to space programs. All the time I’m sort of looking at something and saying, “Can I do that?”

What you discover is you have to trust in yourself, and you have to go out and do it. IEEE has been a major place where it’s an opportunity to talk with leaders who are pretty much thinking the same way. So, okay, you build something and can you do it in a bit of competition. When I was running for IEEE Centennial President, I had no confidence that I was going to win because I’m working with a leadership out of [inaudible]. And of course, you don’t know how it’s going to go. But then you go back, and you remember the faces on people when you talk to them about what they could do, where could they move, and how do you help inspiration.

Here the last story I’m going to tell you is.

Hellrigel:

I’ve had you talking a lot.

Gowen:

No, no, no. I’m telling you stories. I’ll find it. I’ll show you a picture of it. A gentleman [Gowen is probably referring to Norm McKie] came into my office who had been inducted in the Hall of Fame. He said, “I’d like the Hall of Fame to help me raise money. What I want to do is I want to raise money for a Native American woman, and I want to use it as an inspiration to the Native American and to the indigenous community, and would you help.” The president of the Foundation was at the table, and I was very--

Hellrigel:

Is this the Crazy Horse Foundation?

Gowen:

This is Crazy Horse. It’s the Hall of Fame Foundation really. We connected and I said, “That’s a very interesting probability. I’d like to talk to you more.” And Dave Austin [name is unclear] said, “You are crazy. You’re thinking of raising money to build a statue of a Native American woman? It can’t be done.” We’re friends, so it was a challenge. The kid came back several times and each time he came back he’d bring us another trinket so that we wouldn’t forget who he is. I brought in the Superintendent of Mount Rushmore, who has passed by the position, finished it, and was emeritus, and Native American. Strong Native American. [Gowen is probably referring to Gerard Baker, the retired U.S. National Park Service Superintendent of Mount Rushmore National Memorial.] Dave sat on one side of the table we used to have and he sat on the other side.

It became a discussion of Native American women because Norm [McKie] had picked Sacajawea as the woman he wanted to build. You know who she is. If he walked in, he’d have a tough time talking to us. But he pointed out that Sacajawea is a very controversial person because the question is why did she end up with an American Indian team. Why did she basically help build the roots and everything together?

Hellrigel:

Yes, roots.

Gowen:

How did she use her Native American knowledge to do that? She had been coopted. So, he is telling Norm all of these issues. Norm is not very comfortable and I’m the moderator. We ended up agreeing that this needs more thought, so we went off and about two months later Norm came back. He said, “I want you to come to lunch.” And I said, “Oh, what are you going to do at lunch?” He said, “I’m going to give the State a million dollars, and I’m going to give them a million dollars to build a statue.” I’m listening because Norm is a credible person. I said, “Fine.” He said, “I don’t know yet what we’re going to call it, but I had a little conversation with Dale Lamphere.” Dale is the artist laureate for South Dakota. Dale has over fifteen major works that he’s put together, so here is money and here is talent.

Hellrigel:

Yes, talent.

Gowen:

We came together and the governor was there. McKie gave the governor a million dollars to basically give South Dakota a statue that would be a statue to inspire Native American achievement. Dale was there and he pulled up a model of a statue called Dignity. Dignity is 50 foot tall. It is entirely stainless steel. It is a statue that has a Native American woman with her arms outstretched, covered by an honor quilt. The honor quilts we have up here that you saw. So, that starts the project. Periodically I’m checking back and forth with Dale, how’s it coming. He’s telling me all the challenges to use stainless steel because it’s 32-feet-wide by 50 feet tall. The details have got to be first class because Dale doesn’t do anything but first class.

Hellrigel:

And for one million dollars.

Gowen:

They start and I go out at one point to see how it’s coming. They’re now putting the pieces together and that day they were going to put the piece of the shoulder on. I’m curious as to how it’s done. There is a five gallon can sitting out here in like a parking lot, but it’s a ranch that is where you basically train cattle, drive cattle.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay.

Gowen:

If I get you to think in terms of the room, like that wall over there is a five gallon can turned up to sit on. About in here it would be about three feet, five feet, maybe five feet in front of us. There is a model of a Native American woman, no head, but the body. Okay? Now sitting over here is the start of a 50-foot by 32-foot stainless steel statue, and the statue is just now getting the body. So, what’s going onto the body? The statue is actually--the truss is for keeping the statue up about that big because this is going out in a windy surface and it’s going to be challenged as a very, very difficult piece to do. Then I watched Dale, and he has four people helping him take and put on this statue pieces. So, now we’re taking something that is about this square and about this high, and it’s a shoulder. They’re taking this and they’re lifting it up by a crane, 50 feet in the air, they’re moving it over, and they’re getting ready to set it. Dale is now, “Hmm, no, no, go there.” He’s directing how they’re putting this together. And I’m sitting there looking and saying, “My god.”

Sitting on this 50 foot, or this 50 gallon drum or whatever, five-gallon drum. I’m looking over the shoulder of the model, so that it gets put on within inches of the shoulder for precision. He goes through this, and we start talking. I’m asking him technical questions and how does he get it to be able to have the model and all of this together. How did he take his ideas and make this? It’s about a five-foot high statue. Where does he know how to do that? Ultimately, we start. We know each other, but we don’t know each other. So, now we’re at detail level. It’s like what kind of models are you making? How do you cut the paper out, put in this stainless steel?

Then what evolves is a relationship that I stumble into in which I discover that the million dollars is going to build the statue, but there is concern there isn’t accord upon all the details of the statue. The million-dollar people were out looking at it and it’s going to be good, and it’s going to be okay. But they want to do it on a date, and Dale and his wife want to do it on a different date. They want to do it on Native American Day, but the folks who are funding it have a different day. Suddenly, there’s a very interesting challenge, and for two months [we had meetings]. Typically, we would meet every two weeks and just basically talk through what the details are, so it was getting people who are not necessarily apart but aren’t together, to figure out how they were going to do this

Hellrigel:

And compromise?

Gowen:

Ultimately, to say how they’re going to dedicate it. I focused upon the dedication because I couldn’t change the dates. I couldn’t bring it together in a way that I could get them both to champion at that point. We set a date and had a very, very good dedication. There were Native American dancers in all of that, that you would think.

So, that developed a relationship. And what is evolving now is if I want to take Native American students and do something with them that they don’t do, is teach them in coding. How can I mobilize the community of coders, so that they will be mentors and coaches to be able to help these students who are sitting in small schools and there may be two or three of them? There may be five of them. There may be a teacher that really knows what they’re teaching. How do I bring that together? So, that’s what is being done around this table now. The fundamental part of it is to figure out how do you basically get people to have an interest. We are looking at it and it finally came to me that what I am looking at is basically being able to use the Dignity idea. So, what I’m looking at are Dignity scholars. So, if you’re a Native American student or you’re a student, we’ll give you the ability to carry your title as long as you stay with us as Dignity scholars. So, that is another one of those problems solved.

Hellrigel:

Yes, it is.

Gowen:

Here’s to going around and how do you tie it together with people? Fortunately, being able to work with people is a very rewarding process.

Other projects

Hellrigel:

There’s no retirement in the future, just find another project?

Gowen:

Oh, retirement will come when the lid closes.

Hellrigel:

No, you’d be bored.

Gowen:

Yes. Oh God, what I’m going through now is irritating to me because I can’t quite do everything I want to do. Today, we were looking at sort of you need to be careful how you do this. You need to be careful how you do that. I was getting schooled of just knowing that you need stability.

Hellrigel:

And the limits of what you can do now.

Gowen:

You need to be able to walk. You need to cover everything you can, so when you got in the car, there’s a cane there. Nancy is after me to use that cane. Today, I’m working in the yard to redo the pool, fix it, and I’m discovering that the yard is not level.

Hellrigel:

This is the time for you to be the teacher again by bringing your grandchildren in to help?

Gowen:

Well, the grandchildren are all over. We put the next to the oldest through graduation. We have one grandchild who is a Down’s [Down Syndrome] child, so we are working with him. It is coming together. He’s got to live in a world that his speech is limited. There’s always another challenge, so do the challenges.

Hellrigel:

One of my friends has a daughter who has Down Syndrome. She is twenty and in school in New York City. She put together her own LinkedIn page, and she picked an industry. She’s a jeweler because her mom’s a jeweler. She’s been picking up how to do things, and she’s decided she’s a jeweler.

Gowen:

Great.

Hellrigel:

She’s learning.

Gowen:

Now she has license to go and do what she really wants to do.

Hellrigel:

Right. She likes gems and all that.

Gowen:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

It’s just cool and I said to my friend, “Do you know that her webpage or her LinkedIn page said she’s a jeweler?” And she’s like, “What?” I said, “Yes, she’s put the shingle out there now. She’s joined your team.” In another year, she will place out of school because she will be graduating high school.

Gowen:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

She’s decided what she wants to do.

Gowen:

In the circle of activities here, we have a family of twins. One of them is able to go and is wanting to be a CPA [certified public accountant].

Hellrigel:

That’s good.

Gowen:

The other one is in a continual battle with his parents. Within small circles, we will reach out and get more personally involved. But to do this in a way in the process, it’s a drive of helping each other and that is what sort of brings it together.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Yes. Even the Foundation seems to have the same helping philosophy and doing an honest, good work.

Gowen:

Oh, yes. The Foundation was at the right time because I had just basically finished being the university president, and I knew a lot about universities. Subsequently, universities keep changing and education changes, so I’m hesitant to what I tell you about universities because I recognize it’s not my watch today to be doing it. It’s somebody else’s.

Hellrigel:

Yes. They changed culturally and the pressures politically changed.

Gowen:

Yes. But the whole opportunity to look at the Foundation. I was still a faculty member, and I was still the president, so it wasn’t a question that I was looking to get a job, as much as I was looking to figure out what could be contributed.

The invitation came at a time in which I was interested in—

When I went to the first Foundation meeting it was like, “Oh my,” because I was far from the Foundation. I didn’t know what it was, but it gave me motivation to start thinking about what could the Foundation be. That’s how it started. I would come in and basically meet with Fern [Katronetsky] and with Michael [Deering] and all of the people because at that point you had the current director as a person who was basically serving as a “Let me help you put this together.” Karen [Galuchie] evolved and it has been a very interesting process to watch her grow into her position, and to grow into it with great power, because she has caught on. Leah [Jamieson] got it, and she was able to transfer it to Karen. And she looks at it, so then the most important piece isn’t being to see that the Foundation can organize itself in a way that it can do what IEEE needs to do. It can do what the Foundation can do and have the plans for doing that. So, I can’t be more positive on what that--yes, ma’am?

[At this point, Nancy Gowen, Richard (Dick) Gowen’s wife entered the room and announced that she has to run an errand.]

Gowen:

[Dick tells Nancy that he will be done soon, claiming] I can’t think of any other war stories to tell.

Nancy:

Well, I bet you can over the fifteen minutes I’m going to be gone.

Gowen:

Or I’ll think of it after Mary Ann is gone. All right, so what else? What else do you want to cover?

Hellrigel:

Well, I don’t know. I think we’ve covered just about everything. I’ve kept you here talking for the longest time. Is there anything left that you want to add about the IEEE Foundation?

Previous oral histories

Gowen:

Well, one of the aspects is this folder here. I don’t know how, but I take this folder and make it less of what we’ve been doing because what we’ve done is [covered some topics from my earlier oral histories].

But Mary Ann, you have sat there and sort of encouraged me to open and tell you stories. I have gone around and told you stories. The problem I have with this, this is full, this folder has stories in it. They may or may not be of interest to people. So, what I’m interested in finding is someone like this just dropped open to Bruno Weinschel. Bruno was the president of the Foundation two years before me. I think Bruno has passed away. Bruno was a very, very strong chairman, who knew that you could do it this way, do it that way. So, Bruno brought into the Foundation heavy control and that was good because it convinced people they don’t want to do heavy control.

When you look at different people, they bring different gifts. Bruno became a good friend, and we would go down to his operation and watch what he was doing. Bruno always will have a new piece to put in front of my nose. So I--like where you go is that

So, I’ve got Bruno Weinschel here, he was vice president for Professional Activities before me. Then when I came as vice president, my thoughts were more towards trying to organize our operations in the United States Activities Board [USAB], so it was bringing it together. Then these efforts became important to the future of our outreach to members, and started having members be able to be involved on the programs. We organized the conference over Labor Day. It was a conference in which we were transitioning from the professional development to the IEEE UCEP. Then we organized a conference over Labor Day which brought together what we called the Pace Organization Group. The activities of this group since could not be used--could use some clarity and together, so it goes down along that kind of a vein. When I looked at this, what became interesting to me was going and editing, and take it so that while the ideas that you put down here were of great interest to you, bring it into a way that the leadership and the people who need to be leaders can see how it’s vital to them.

When I looked at this, I realized that it’s just a lot of experiences, but living those experiences is something I’ve done. And as I’m looking at trying to take the indigenous population and get them to want to learn coding, what I’ve got to look to is I’ve got to look to the potential leaders of IEEE and get them to see why. If you look at the programs that were done, these programs can be of great interest to them. So, while I’m doing this, I’m going through the process of how do I convince people to jump in and learn to be a leader. Because, when I look at the students that I’m trying to help to learn coding, I’ve got to get them to decide they want to do this. When I look at this document here, it’s the wrong people I’m speaking to because, in effect, I’m speaking to me. I’m telling you the experiences I’ve had and I’m telling you what I enjoy doing. What it needs to have is a slight twist in it, to tell people why they want to go in and become a leader in IEEE, looking at how they take--and it’s a Signature Programs. It’s developing the capabilities of reaching people who are not involved necessarily in IEEE.

Hopefully there’d be enough in these papers and, if you cut them by 90 percent, you basically could end up with something that might be of value to people. So, I’m giving you a little bit of license. Do I look at these? I went through and I didn’t read it all, but what I did is I read a lot of the stories that are particularly in the beginning. I was fascinated by them because the stories I told I realized that you can have an audience of one and it isn’t an audience. So, if you want to do something, you’ve got to put it in words that people are saying, “Hmm, interesting idea. So that’s something that I could do.” Just basically put this aside and put it out within the archives or wherever we do, but get some of the experiences active.

Hellrigel:

Okay. There are two things to do. You’ve had three oral histories. This is a fourth in a somewhat different direction because we spoke a lot about the IEEE Foundation. We edit the transcripts. There are two projects going on in my mind. The transcripts of the oral history, which is like raw data that people can use when they do their research. We can also create a first-hand history, which would be an abbreviated version that you draft. The first-hand history is an autobiographical account which will be a document that does what you want it to do, meaning you will have the opportunity to write your life story as opposed to telling or speaking it in an oral history.

Gowen:

Yes. But I don’t necessarily want to do away with these other oral histories because people like you or people like me will look at this and say, “Ah-ha, here is our validation of how this was done.”

Hellrigel:

Right. We [the IEEE History Center] send you the transcripts and then you tell us, “Okay, it’s okay to put them on the Internet.” If you don’t give us the okay to put them on the Internet, then they’re “not released” and not posted on ETHW.

Gowen:

I understand, they’ll never come out. But when I look at this, there are people like us who will look at this and have the comfort of reading it through and saying, “Okay, we--this was done.” Now if you put that paper out, the probability of people looking at it, I probably don’t need more than one hand. But it’s something that in the research community will be useful. So, if you look at the Foundation, where did the Foundation develop and why?

When I tell you this story in here about working at Rutgers and doing my thesis, and how that all came together, you look at this and I know when I would look at this, the first question is, “Who is that crazy? Why did he choose to go in and do his senior design project?” My senior design project was light years or miles away from what other people did because you didn’t have to do what I did to be able to prove you’re an engineer.

Hellrigel:

Overkill?

Gowen:

Yes. Oh, many orders, because the number of days that I spent in that lab building it. When the faculty would be going home, they’d say, “Gowen, are you still here? Is it ever going to work? How’s it coming?” So, I got to the point where I could show the faculty part of it. I diverted because I needed credibility. All of that is built into this in the sense that you don’t highlight it, but if you’re interested in asking those questions, you’ve got an example in here. So, I look at this more of example stories. By getting it over to the point where it can get used, is a different document, so am I interested in basically both documents? Yes, I would release at this stage of the game whatever would help us as a Foundation and help the IEEE because I read it and I was fascinated reading.

Hellrigel:

Well, it’s one of the few, you have three previous oral histories, you’re nearly the only person that commented about the IEEE Foundation. Your life story is fascinating and broad because your career, you have education, and you have the Air Force. you have the academic administration, but then you have the non-profits. It is a very complex career. It is very diverse, and in the end, it is a very differently balanced and very respectable career. There are some people that I talk to that sometimes have such different and vast experiences.

Gowen:

Well, they go to places that other people won’t go to.

Hellrigel:

Well, yes. Or they’ve gone someplace where you don’t know why they are there or why they made that decision.

Gowen:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

It’s like it doesn’t really represent what they’ve done, but yours are pretty balanced. And the fact that you’ve seen the transition from AIEE and the merger of AIEE and IRE, then the creation of IEEE-USA, and then the globalization of IEEE. You have one of the few careers in IEEE that’s done all of that and is still active, because sometimes after their presidency some of the past presidents are no longer active or they will go into high-end consulting.

Control Data Corporation

Gowen:

Yes. I’m going to use this and you’re absolutely right, and I haven’t. When the supercomputer business came in a father of students who had been here at Mines came out with the students and then met me. We developed a friendship. I’m at a Board of Regents meeting and I get a call and Lloyd Thorndike says to me, “Dick we’re going to do an adventure. We’re going to build a supercomputer company. Do you want to be on the board and tell me more.” So, there was a gentleman from MIT and me who they asked to come on the board. The board was basically made up of two factions. There was a faction that was basically wanting to develop a new supercomputer and had ideas for doing that. There was another faction which is the group within CDC that was doing computers and wasn’t sure that it really wanted a new computer, so.

Hellrigel:

The Center for Disease Control?

Gowen:

No, Control Data Corporation.

Hellrigel:

Oh, Control Data Corporation?

Gowen:

Yes. The CDC evolved and you had great leadership that evolved in doing it, and then CDC basically was out fighting IBM to be in the leading edge of computers and development.

Within CDC, they weren’t sure that they wanted to have a monitor of any other than CDC. So, the supercomputer this group wanted, they sort of got invited to be outside the door. So that’s how I was asked to go in. Lloyd [Thorndyke], who was the president, was comfortable, very comfortable with me. The other person who was at MIT ultimately got busy, so it ended up that I was the person that went up to the fourteen floor and asked for money. I was also the person whose stock was turned in last because I was the person that could sue. When you have internal people, are you going to sue CDC? No. You’re not going to do that because you’re already compromised. There are some suits you can do, but you’re not going to do those. For six months I directed an effort to maximize the returns of money that the people who were doing the work, and ultimately after they had all been maximized. I had the ability to go to the lawyers and depart. We all did well. That was as close as I came at one point to doing business.

When I told you about the bikes, there was an effort and is an effort here in Rapid City that does balance bikes. If you think about people just learning to walk early, the one- to two-year-olds, can you give them a bike that they can learn to sort of coast and then learn how to coast down the hill and not tip over and all that, so balance bikes. We were developing the bikes for the boys; we were talking to them about would they be interested in putting on a bicycle that could offer an electric bike. We would take a balance bike and motorize it. For the development period we had a local. The dad of the boys and the mom of the boys were working with the Strider bike to get it to go. When we were building the bike, we had already contracted with a number of companies to make 10,000 bikes a year. So, we were moving into--

Hellrigel:

If you were contracting 10,000 bikes, you were serious.

Gowen:

We were serious. We were serious and the Strider people were serious. Something called--it’s on television and it’s the game that you go in and you make your bid before a board.

Hellrigel:

Oh, the Shark Tank.

Gowen:

Shark Tank and the balance bikes connected. Strider was not going to put its bike out to Shark Tank, but there were others who put it out and just kicked the props out of the Strider. Strider was on a track, and we were tracking them. They were shooting to be able to sell a million Strider bikes a year. They were at 500,000 bikes, so they were doubling. It was comfortable because they were building it. They had a good sales force. I went off to meetings with Strider and watched how they were selling, so I was convinced. They told us that they had to reexamine their plan. They were not in a position where they could make bikes. We started checking bikes around and I concluded that was the fastest way to go broke because you had mom and pop shops. You were out and the Strider bike’s a specialty area. So, you do that. Trying to sell Strider bikes that were motorized I went to shows, I stood to the side, and I watched who was talking about buying electric bikes. It convinced me that it was going to be a tough sell to try to make money doing electric bikes without having marketing, so Strider was our marketing agent. When they could not do it, we, in effect, I needed to clean up some other material to make sure that I didn’t have any unanswered questions.

I got into the bikes because the gentleman had been very active in the department when I was at Iowa State, and I knew him because he was making television. He was making color televisions and doing color televisions that was his research. He was good at it. Off and on, in the time that I left Iowa State, we would intersect. When I became the president [at Mines] and I’m doing all this battleground, he called me up one day and said, “Dick, you need a vice president. Are you interested in one?” So, Bill came up. He was closing his company in Oklahoma and came up and then became my vice president. Bill was a first-rate, no-nonsense kind of person. One day he came over and said, “You’ve got to fire the head of the civil engineering department.” I looked at him and said, “Bill, you’re crazy. Why do you want to do that?” He says, “He’s out to basically take civil engineering here and turn it into a whole different effort, and that’s not where you want to go.” I don’t know. We must have spent a couple of hours just talking about why Bill wants me to do this. Ultimately, I fired the head of the civil engineering department and that just rippled through the whole civil engineering community here. They were ready to lynch me, but they respected Bill. We ended up continuing to grow, and to grow the community. So, Bill retired.

Hellrigel:

You could take away the chair of the department, but they have tenure?

Gowen:

That was true, so then you had to end up battling in many, many ways.

But what Bill became engaged with is when he was in Oklahoma he came into a business. The business that he came into made welding equipment. I’m talking about Bill Hughes. What Bill did, he ended up taking six and eight foot in diameter steel pipe, big pipe, and he made an induction heater that you could make part of that pipe cherry red. The reason you did that is now you could make it so it wouldn’t rust, so you basically built a pipe that could be buried in the sand, and it would not erode.

Bill decided that he took what he was doing, and he modeled it so that he could make an electric vehicle. What he was looking at is making an aircraft, so he wanted to make a flying machine. He built it and he made it so that you could go over here, and you could turn on the machine. And what it did is it basically turned on a generator. The generator would go out here and it would turn on a flying machine, so to speak. Bill wanted some help because Bill was in the hospital, dying of leukemia.

I’m looking at this and saying, “How do I tell Bill no?” What I ended up doing, I said, “Bill dump it on me, and let me take a good look at it.” He had gone out to companies and had been trying to get companies to buy it. So, I took it and what I ended up with is I said, “Bill I have some bad news for you. What you put together you can’t sell for a reason, and I think the reason is you haven’t proven how well it works. You can turn dials and it will do things.” Ultimately, I said, “But I think I know where I can get you money.” So, I went to the Army, and I said to the Army, “We could prove that you have the capability.” And the Army put up, in this particular case, it was nearly five million dollars.

Hellrigel:

Oh, gosh. That’s a lot of money.

Gowen:

We did a very detailed research project because when you went in and when I talked to the people at Brussels and showed them what we could do, we could outperform the Chinese bike because the Chinese bike was narrow. What we did is we basically broadened it, so that when you were coming up to speed with the bike, you were coming up to speed and you were in the profile of our bike. The Chinese bike came up sharp and went down sharp, so you could go to very great extremes, but you couldn’t go there long. So, all of that with Bill.

We started to try to find somebody to run the company. We found a very good graduate and he said, “No, I don’t want to do that.” Then I said to Bill, “Well, Bill, let’s put a company together and you be the president and I’ll be the vice president.” [Bill said,] “No, Dick. You know, I’m going to die.” I said, “Until you die, you’re the president.” I put a proposal together and basically went into Bill and said, “Here it is. Tell me if you see any problem.” Like you were talking to me. Bill said, “Well, I’ll look at it in more detail tonight.” At 7:30 in the morning, Stella, his wife, called up and said, “Bill died last night.” Now you can say, “God, you handle us in interesting ways. So, you kept Bill alive long enough for him to be able to read it and leave it.” From the point of view of, “Here it is Dick; decide if you’re going to do it or not.”

Hellrigel:

In his mind, he came away a winner because he got five million dollars in funding, and that is not shabby.

Nancy:

No, it’s not.

Gowen:

Yes. The funding for the involvement started at two million. Then the Army caught on that you could do this and funded the rest of the money. Our senator became a good advocate and many people working together in line doing this are what we are. If you get people who can see that what you’re doing is credible and it’s a risk, so we basically had two more fundings through the congress. It did a lot of work, but Bill passed away and we looked into building a company. This was 2007, and we didn’t hire people seriously in the company until the end of 2008, so we did a lot of just developing it. Then we put the company together and the company came together well. There were some days in which I was interested in crushing heads in the company, but it ultimately went into the Strider side. That’s why we are not making motors right now

Hellrigel:

Well, it sounds like you had fun.

Gowen:

Oh, along the way you had challenges, so you did the challenges.

You mentioned the church and the church activities. Tomorrow night the bishop is coming to have dinner with us. The night that I ended up in the hospital, the bishop was coming to have dinner with us, so we cancelled it on that night.

Nancy:

The bishop’s having spinal injections, so he cancelled.

Hellrigel:

I saw the Thomas Moore Basilica. It looks very nice from the outside.

Nancy:

Yes, it is. You have the cathedral and then there’s the St. Thomas Moore High School and middle school right across the street.

Gowen:

All of that together has been a humbling process because you start with nothing. You know, there were no plans for me to go to college.

Hellrigel:

No plans. That’s what I read in one of your oral histories. I think too that when people understand the humble roots that many people come from, it’s just keeping your nose to the grindstone that you do something, and that the success starts small. Like in my family, my father said, “Everyone’s going to college.” There’s no you are going to think about it. There wasn’t a choice. There was a choice, but not really. For him, even though he didn’t have a big salary and we have a lot of money, graduating college was a success. He had that vision that all his kids were going to go to college. I taught at two-year schools for a while around where I grew up.

Gowen:

Sure.

Hellrigel:

One of the kids came up to me afterward the first class meeting because he’s from my hometown, Passaic, New Jersey. He said, “you know, if you could do it, then we can do it.” We were both coming from an inner city, and yes, you can do it.

Hellrigel:

I had a slightly different background than his, but not too much different. I said, “Yes, you just have to focus and work, and I don’t think you should buy a sports car when you’re twenty-years-old.” I saw many of the students at the two-year colleges getting into debt because they need a car to get to school, and all the school loans. You need a reliable car, but not a flashy car. I said, “Well, you got the bus., or just buy a reliable older car.”

Nancy:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

You don’t need the expensive car.

Nancy:

You don’t need it.

Gowen:

Amongst your friends, you’re not interested in getting a car.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I said, “In the long run, you have to have a goal, and that’s what’s important.” And that’s what I learned through a lot of the oral histories I recorded, the diversity of people’s backgrounds. Basically, my policy is to win with the cards you have and not to whine about the cards you don’t have.

Nancy:

You don’t have, yes.

Hellrigel:

Because you can never get them.

Nancy:

Right.

Rutgers

Gowen:

Yes. I did not have an involvement that was even looking at college. Luke’s and Ingram were two teachers. One was when I was in elementary school and one was the chemistry teacher. They knew my background and the elementary school and this teacher was three blocks from us. She knew the family, and she knew what we were. She knew there was a snowball’s chance that I would ever go to college because the money and the way of the family and the money support was. In the time in which you had to put applications in, I began to get some very strong guidance of what could be and why I should go to college. So, I got help in learning how to put an application together. I didn’t even know what Rutgers was and what they would do and how it would come. It was across town and it was a nice place to go see things. So, it was an incredible surprise when I put the application in and I got a full ride scholarship.

Hellrigel:

At that point it was the all-men.

Gowen:

Oh, yes.

Nancy:

The women were at Douglass College.

Hellrigel:

Yes, at Douglass College. Rutgers College had been a private college and it just become a state institution.

Nancy:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Yes, because it was private and affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church. It never had the money like Princeton, but it is almost as old.

Gowen:

Oh, there was never a comparison.

Hellrigel:

No comparison.

Gowen:

You drive down to Princeton and look at what a university was like, and I turn around and drive home and say, “That’s not for me.” Ultimately, when I went to Rutgers the question was what I was going to study. I would tinker. I made a xylophone that you could play with. I made a boat out of tin cans. So, what I’d do is I’d say, “Don’t throw that away. Let me have the can.” Then I’d open the can up and I had a piece of tin. So, I could take the pieces of tin, solder them together, make the boat, and take it over to the park.

Hellrigel:

The pond [know as Passion Puddle] on the Douglass College campus?

Nancy:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Oh, no, no. The--

Gowen:

No, not Douglass.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I know the park you’re talking about.

Gowen:

Over in the big park.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Gowen:

And where there wasn’t--

Nancy:

Oh, Buccleuch Park?

Hellrigel:

Yes, Buccleuch Park.

Gowen:

No, it wasn’t Buccleuch.

Hellrigel:

No? Then I don’t know where you--

Gowen:

It’s on the river, beyond the river.

Hellrigel:

Johnson Park?

Gowen:

Pardon?

Hellrigel:

Johnson Park?

Gowen:

Where did we go to the last time we were in New Brunswick? Johnson?

Nancy:

We got a lunch, and we went and sat in Johnson Park.

Gowen:

I would take it over to Johnson Park and sail it. Then I saved up enough money to get a little motor. That’s how you gain enough experience. You don’t count upon someone guiding you. You guide yourself. When the teachers came in, I was kind of excited about it, but I didn’t have any hope, so I was surprised.

Hellrigel:

Well, it worked out well.

Nancy:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Very well.

Nancy:

Yes, it did.

Yaak

Hellrigel:

You made decisions that you needed to. Going to Yaak was probably a good decision. It didn’t aggravate you as to go to Panama or to stay in Alabama or somewhere.

Gowen:

What was your impression overall out of Yaak?

Nancy:

I liked Yaak. It was out in the woods, true. You had to travel forever to get anything, but the friendships there and how people helped each other and relied on each other, it was great.

Gowen:

Do you remember when I first called you about Yaak?

Nancy:

Yes. You picked a dead body out of the stream. That was one of the telephone calls.

Gowen:

Do you remember the Dirty Shame?

Nancy:

Of course, I remember the Dirty Shame. It’s still there or at least it was there several years ago.

Gowen:

I went into the Dirty Shame because I couldn’t find the base and they gave me directions.

Hellrigel:

Oh, this is a bar?

Nancy:

Yes, it’s a bar and a general store.

Hellrigel:

A bar and a general store, cool.

Gowen:

On the top rack is a sign, “The guns have to be here before we’ll serve you.”

Hellrigel:

Oh, that’s a good move.

Nancy:

That’s a very good move.

Gowen:

In the process of which we discovered that the reason the Dirty Shame existed is because this was a mining area. The communities were mining communities. These were people who had tolerance, depending upon who you were talking to.

Hellrigel:

The factions?

Gowen:

Yes. The community was the Dirty Shame community. The base community had housing which you bought up and you could put your trailer.

Hellrigel:

With trailers?

Nancy:

Yes.

Gowen:

It conditioned the way that you looked at life. Nancy and I went to high school and the kids that we had in high school literally, you could figure out some people that were reasonably close. They weren’t interested in sort of proving to the commander that you could drink more than he could drink. It was a good, good base. The involvement of going to Yaak was rooted within because we just graduated, and we hadn’t really formed the kind of IEEE connections. What we had formed was just a question of, we’re going to have to work hard to get money because we now owned a trailer.

Hellrigel:

You got to pay that electric bill.

Gowen:

Well, yes, the electric bill was paid. It was not expensive.

Nancy:

We didn’t pay the electric bill in the trailer at that time

Gowen:

No.

Hellrigel:

The government paid that one, the electric bill?

Nancy:

Yes.

Gowen:

Yes. Because you were completely isolated.

Hellrigel:

Well, that’s good.

Gowen:

When we ultimately finished moving to Iowa, the prayer between us was, “Don’t send the trailer.”

Nancy:

I was ready to live in a house.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Gowen:

Yes.

Nancy:

We had to.

Hellrigel:

Yes. You got to do it.

Gowen:

We lived in the trailer, and we ultimately sold the trailer. The thing you miss most were the walnuts banging on the trailer, dropping down.

Hellrigel:

You heard dink, dink, dink.

Gowen:

Yes. Dink, dink, dink.

Nancy:

Hickory Walnut Trailer Park.

Gowen:

Those are pieces that are back there. They brought us onto the campus. We moved into the campus, and we thought we were going to be there for a year. As I told you, the reason we stayed for three years is because they would not let us graduate.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Gowen:

It was a fascinating time. I think one of the byproducts that I got out of Iowa State is I am extremely allergic to animals.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Gowen:

I concluded the payback was the number of animals.

Hellrigel:

The dogs?

Gowen:

Yes, the dogs that I worked with. It was just extraordinary because I have difficulty being in houses where there are dogs. It is just the changes that you go through. It’s a crazy time.

Hellrigel:

Well, on that note I will end this recording and let you go.

Gowen:

You gather your things together.

Hellrigel:

Okay, and thank you for your time and a lovely day.