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The Shoulders of Giants
Sep. 29th, 2013 08:18 pm
We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than them, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.
- Bernard of Chartres, 12th Century scholar
On Friday, around six in the evening, my uncle by marriage, Albert “Bud” Wheelon, died.
I don’t know how this is my life, some days. Growing up in the shadow of my own father, a giant in his field, and then marrying into a family with giants of their own. Possibly it’s the only way it could have happened. For I was never intimidated by Bud. I had grown up with men and women just like him, because of the peripatetic orbit of my father’s work and career. So when my husband first introduced me to his family, I was, frankly, not impressed.
It took time for that to happen. And when it did…
Bud wasn’t just a giant. He was humble and erudite and fucking brilliant, and in short order, I loved him and continue to love him with a fidelity as close to the love for my own father as can be possible. He was kind and gentle, but with a core of titanium that you could just feel. You didn’t want to play poker with him. His Game Face was that good.
He did enormous things in his life. Youngest and first Deputy Director of Science and Technology for the Central Intelligence Agency. The second Mayor of Area 51, responsible for wrapping up the U2 program and making OXCART go, a project that we all know better as the SR-71 Blackbird, a plane that I was obsessed with as a child, a project that dear friends of my father worked on in direct capacity as engineers and fabricators, and which Bud oversaw to great success. The only civilian who ever got to *ride* in her, a fact that I was insanely jealous of, because he got what I had always dreamed of.
Because of him, we got the KH-9 HEXAGON which some will know as the Big Bird satellite. Because of him? You now have Google Earth.
They don’t make people like Bud anymore. Except that I think maybe they do. But they are not held in the esteem that they once were. I think that it is people like Aaron Schwartz and Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning who are his intellectual heirs. I think that, like my father, Bud’s legacy is both a challenge and a burden and a call to action.
I think that I am ridiculously grateful for my own history, because faced with this challenge and duty, I do not find myself quailing. I find myself bracing my feet and nodding. And saying only one thing:
Rest well, sir. We have the watch.
Originally published at ANGELA N. HUNT. You can comment here or there.
