|
|
||
08/02/06 |
           
CONTENTS |
How I came to write my biographyA lunch conversation at Edna’s in 1999 turned to my World War 2 experience. Edna’s friend Collette, a teacher, was very interested in some World War 2 history she had never heard about, and suggested that I write an autobiography. I had never thought of writing, much less publishing one. Who could be interested in Henry Kolm? But as I thought about it, I came to realize that my children really know very little about my life, and my grandchildren know even less. I want them to know me and the world in which I grew up, and what I accomplished, and to this end I have decided that writing an autobiography (perhaps memoirs is a better name) just for my descendants is a worthwhile effort. I will divide it into chronological life period chapters (childhood, adolescence, military, etc) no longer than four or five pages, interspersed with perennial chapters that span multiple periods (music, aviation, motorcycling, Tae-Kwon-Do, etc.). Each chapter can be read separately, at the expense of some repetition). I don’t want to make any reader wade through the entire book. Musicians may not care about my flying, and pilots may not care about music. I am proud of my life, and I have very little if anything to regret or to be ashamed of. I have made some enemies, but they have always been outweighed if not outnumbered by my friends. And I am just as proud of my enemies as I am of my friends. Nevertheless, I am proud that I could sit down to a friendly lunch with every person I have ever dealt with. Let me say without apology that I consider false modesty as unforgivable as any other form of hypocrisy, and I have therefore always left modesty to people with something to be modest about. So here is what I have cause to be proud about. I am fluent in German, English and French. I play the piano and organ at an advanced amateur level; my repertoire includes most of the great Beethoven sonatas and the Bach partitas. My three-year military career includes service with the 220th armored engineer battalion, and the Pentagon intelligence team that interrogated captured German generals and key scientists, planned the systematic destruction of the Nazi war industry, and imported key German scientists, including Wernher von Braun and his Peenemünde rocket team. I started MIT with a perfect 5.0 cumulative grade as a freshman, and finished with a PhD in physics, having earned my way by running a scientific translation service and by teaching thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. In my doctoral thesis I discovered quantized vorticity in a Bose-Einstein fluid, a largely forgotten accomplishment for which Wolfgang Ketterle received the Nobel prize fifty years later. I spent thirty years on the MIT faculty, raising about a dozen graduate students, and building the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory. I was named Senior Scientist of the National Magnet Laboratory and Lecturer in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. I also generated the world record pulsed and continuous magnetic fields. I earned a commercial pilot license, with instrument, multi-engine and seaplane ratings, and logged about four thousand hours in command, mostly in my own Navajo Chieftain, a 700 hp turbo-charged ten passenger cabin class executive twin. I flew into most major airports in the US and Canada, mostly without the assistance of a co-pilot. I took simulator training every spring and fall at Flight Safety International learning center in Lakeland Florida. I earned a first degree black belt in Tae-Kwon-Do from the twice-Korean national champion Sukjong-Chung, who taught at the U S Senate and at MIT before starting his own school in Cambridge. I was involved in founding about a dozen high-tech companies, a flying club, and an air charter corporation which owned my plane. I was awarded the Peter Mark Medal by the Department of Defense and named "Engineer of the Year" and "Associate Fellow" by the Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. I was granted about sixty US and foreign patents in a wide range of fields. I published a book and about fifty scientific papers, and was involved in making several scientific films. My wife of 50 years, and I built our dream house with our own hands and raised four outstanding daughters in the most beautiful surroundings anybody could imagine: a forty acre forest along the Sudbury River, near Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Elizabeth died in 2002 after a 16 month battle with cancer. We placed a permanent conservation restriction on Weir Meadow. My seventy-fifth birthday on the eve of the second millennium seems like an appropriate time to begin my biography.. So here it is in its present form. I hope it will prove interesting and educational, historically and psychologically, as well as genealogically. Perhaps I can even make it entertaining. But I find that it is an iterative process that will take many years, as I keep remembering more and more experiences and people. I am therefore keeping it on 3.5 inch floppy disks in Word Perfect format so that every copy I distribute will be current version. Henry (Heinz) Herbert Kolm
|
This site was last updated 07/30/06