Remembrances of Don Stevison
Jim Mattice:
A great and funny guy. Always seemed to have the right things in focus.
John Speers:
Don was a great guy dedicated at work and very skilled in banjo. He taught courses in banjo here and in national meets. My father-in-law played with him in the Kettering Banjo Society and traveled to a number of presentations. Always fun, especially with him playing lead. Folks will miss his subtle wit and superb music skills.
Dr. Merrill Minges:
We worked side by side when Don first came to ML in the early 60’s. In 1961 Steve, Gary Denman and I (2nd Lt) were directed by Al Lovelace and Walt Conrardy to create a new ML Thermal Properties Laboratory. Each of us had specialties: Gary built research equipment for measuring dynamic thermal properties, Lt. Minges did thermal conductivity and Don did optical properties. Don had the fanciest equipment – very sophisticated high precision optics built by Perkin Elmer. We all published together and Don became a national authority in thermal optics. He also partnered with lead researchers in this arena at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST).
We set up our thermal laboratory in B17 which was occupied for the first time by ML in 1960 to house ML Headquarters and the newly created Applications Division (now System Support) of which our lab and Clay Harmsworth’s mechanical property laboratory provided the main in-house capabilities. The ML director at the time, Col Lee Standifer, often stopped by to see all the new machinery especially Don’s fancy set up. Our immediate boss at the time, the section chief, Ed Horne is pictured beside one of Clay’s tensile test machines (on the history page: AFRL/RX 100 Days Slide Presentation - slide 42).
Steve was low key – a important team attribute among a bunch of hard chargers. Our little thermal property group had great fun and we believed we made useful contributions for the AF and for the broader tech community. Don’s thermal optics work and his contributions later in other assignments in ML were vey important to the broad ML contributions in ballistic missile thermal protection systems, space optics and the entire ML heritage of laser hardening and missile defense. My fondest remembrances of ML are from that period in the early 60s and knowing that the thermal lab work proved to be of importance. Don is a very special part of these memories - he was always a dear friend.