Moving Metal

ROCKET SCIENTIST L ongtime Reliance Board member Bill Rumer was a real- life rocket scientist. Born in July 1926 to an Irish family in St. Louis, he grew up on the West Coast during the Great Depression. As a young man, his life’s goal was only to get a steady job because “none of the men on my block had one.” In 1940, at age fourteen and still in school, Rumer became a qualified machinist and built aircraft engine parts for Lockheed. Graduating early in 1942, he studied for a year and a half at the California Institute of Technology before joining the U.S. Navy in 1944, which retrained him as a radar technician. After World War II, Rumer returned to Caltech on the G.I. Bill. He graduated in 1949 with an electrical engineering degree. He went to work for Hughes Aircraft as a radar engineer but left in 1956 to join the RAND Corporation, where he studied strategic bombing and advocated unmanned vehicle technology for military reconnaissance. The next year he was appointed to Reliance’s Board of Directors in accordance with Thomas Neilan’s wishes. In 1961, Rumer left RAND and went to work for Garrett AiResearch as an aerospace engineer. He specialized in preliminary design work and “just had bloody fun” conceptualizing airplanes, autopilot systems, deep sea submarines, hydrofoil boats, and rapid transit cars. Garrett AiResearch was a NASA contractor during the 1960s space race and built environmental control equipment for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. As a design engineer, Rumer was heavily involved in developing certain spacecraft systems for NASA and even helped rescue the Apollo 13 astronauts when their service module malfunctioned on the way to the moon in 1970. Rumer retired from the aerospace business in 1985, but remained a Reliance Board member until 2004, enlivening the monthly meetings with his jolly humor and trademark cigars.

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