Wow! I’ll bet your dad had some great stories....of the ones he could tell!
Dad didn’t talk about work very much at all. He couldn’t. I learned more about what he did from the little memoir he wrote for us kids a couple of years before he died, and that still didn’t say much. One paragraph pertained to the time period when he met Neil.
“My final effort at the AEDC was bringing on-line and operating a medium-sized transonic wind tunnel (called 4T) where the primary activity was related to the dropping, or firing, of various weapons or other stores from military aircraft. At one point, I was one of the most knowledgeable people in the country in the techniques of dynamic-drop model design and testing. In this activity, I was the supervisor of a group of about a dozen test project engineers in the conduct of customer test programs.”
Why Neil was at a lecture about this, I don’t know, but he was. My brother flew out there with Dad that trip, though he had to wait elsewhere on the base while Dad gave the lecture. He was disappointed he didn’t get to meet Neil, too, but he still had a great time. Said he met a lot of nice people and got a little tour of the base. I’m still green with envy. :-)