Autobiography of Ralph Raymond Beal, Jr.
(Copyright©1998 by Ralph Beal. All Rights Reserved.)
Chapter Two-College and Flying
My Dad had graduated from Stanford in 1912 in Electrical Engineering, and he was working for RCA Communications in San Francisco in the radio field, so I was interested in electronics and decided to go to Stanford. However, at that time, it was required that a student take one year of pre-engineering at San Jose State College before being admitted as an undergraduate engineer, so I spent a year at State, commuting daily on the train that ran from Palo Alto to the campus.
The pre-engineering curriculum, in addition to requiring much math, required German as a language because at that time most of the advanced text books were written in German. I learned the usual words used in social conversations, but the technical terms were very difficult for me. As a result, I obtained a passing average and was admitted to Stanford as a Freshman, class of 1938 in Electrical Engineering.
Stanford, at that time, was a wonderful college, especially for Engineering students. The Faculty was tops and the classes were good, except for one thing - I wanted electronics and they taught only power generation and transmission. I took an interesting psychology course, which was at the cutting edge of many studies undertaken in later years, and served as a guinea pig in intelligence tests (I tested at 150) and various measures of human performance. I really enjoyed the experience and the participation.
Ever since Lindberg's flight in 1927, and after seeing him at the San Francisco airport following his flight, I wanted to fly. During his post-flight visit to San Francisco I had a ride in an open biplane operated by the Varney Air Service and still have a certificate stating that I had attained an altitude of 2000 feet. Paul Mantz, the famous stunt flyer was operating the airport on Stanford property, just south of the Stanford Stadium, and I took my first flying lessons from him and a Major Frank in a Kinner-powered Fleet aircraft in 1934. That led to my total love of flying and aircraft in general.
In early 1935 my Dad was transferred by RCA from the San Francisco Office to the New York Office, and so we sold the house in Palo Alto to Al Werry and moved to New York. Our first address was the Warwick Hotel at Two East 72nd Street, where we stayed until renting an apartment at 26 East 93rd Street, which was an upper middle-class neighborhood at that time. (It has changed a great deal since then).
I enrolled at Cornell University, again in Electrical Engineering, and moved into the Willard Straight Hall dormitory on campus. My transportation was a bicycle, which was very difficult to ride in the deep winter snow. The class work again was all in the area of power generation and transmission and there was only one class offered on the campus in electronics: Vacuum Tube Theory. Of course I took that class, along with many others which were not as interesting or enjoyable.
During my first year at Cornell, I was rushed by the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity, and was initiated the following spring. The next year I moved into the Fraternity house at 2 Ridgewood Road, Ithaca, and enjoyed a wonderful fraternal life. Many years later I learned that the ritual had been set up by Masons, and it followed the same basic lessons. In 1986 I was awarded the Golden Legion as a 50 year member of Phi Delta Theta, and am still occasionally active.
I spent all of my spare time at the Ithaca airport, where I came to be very close to Pete Peters, the manager, who taught me to fly. I soloed in a 40 horsepower Piper Cub (NC 17209) on October 23, 1936. From then on, my weekends were spent at the airport, working for flying time until I obtained my Private Pilot's license number 36898 (I was the 898th pilot licensed in the United States in 1936). Pete let me take prospective students for rides, and include a bit of instruction, thus giving me air time to log. I worked around the airplanes in all capacities, and in the winter we recovered and doped the fabric on airplanes in the heated hangar, when the weather made flying impossible. Talk about getting high!
As I gained more experience I helped put on air shows over Ithaca on weekends to lure passengers to the airport and then took them for rides, usually in Waco open cockpit airplanes.
One year, I was authorized to fly the first airmail from Ithaca to Syracuse, New York in a Stinson Reliant. It made the local press, but the extremely turbulent air made my passenger sick. Anyway, the mail got through, even if the passenger didn't really care.
In 1986 I was awarded a Golden Year Membership in the Silver Wings Fraternity, which is made up of people who soloed in powered aircraft more than 50 years before qualifying.
By the end of the 1938 school year, it was mutually agreed by Cornell University and yours truly that I was not cut out for Electrical Engineering at Cornell.