IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - January 2023 - 98

Interview With Dr. William Dale Blair
My mom was a beautician, and
her shop was next to our house. She
was easygoing, and when I misbehaved,
she would whack me with a
hairbrush. My mom did fix you biscuits
and sausage gravy for the first
time at her house. She is still amazed
to this day that was the first time you
ever had biscuits and sausage gravy.
She remembers you often.
My dad owned his own conDale
as a senior in high school in 1981.
struction business for many years of
my life and built many of the commercial buildings in our
community. He was very good in math, but he walked out
of sophomore English during Julia Caesar and never went
back. So, he received a vocational diploma instead of a
high school degree. We built his house at night and on
weekends, which took over two years. He was a very good
finish carpenter. A few years before he passed, in about
2006, he came to visit me in Georgia and helped me finish
the trim around my kitchen cabinets that I had installed. I
naively included some really interesting decorations to the
cabinets that created a trim nightmare. It would have taken
me years to have finished the trim, but my dad at age about
64 finished in a couple of hours. I watched him measure
twice and cut the trim once with my miter saw, and it was
amazing. My dad taught me many things about life. One of
the most memorable and important lessons was to be who
you are. My dad told me that most everyone, at least the
ones who matter, knows who you are, and trying to be
someone else only fools yourself. He told me that if I can
convince someone to like me, that someone down the street
will be able to convince that someone to dislike me. He
told me that people must make up their own minds about
you as they come to know you on their own. Thus, I have
spent very little of my time trying to convince others of
things about me. From this, I became convinced that one is
best served being the best self that they can be. If one does
not like something about themselves, then change it and be
yourself. You will be you much better than you will be anybody
else. I believe that we are all uniquely created individuals
and that is good. This has served me well.
Mom currently lives with my sister in Louisville, KY.
That is my " twin " sister, Deborah, who you have met. She
was born in 1974. She had a long gestation period. I also
have two half-brothers, Matt and John.
Peter: You got married early and had some (great!)
daughters, all while you were in college at Tennessee
Tech, right? Plus, you had to work to pay for your schooling
and to support your family. Tell us about that.
Dale: Well, I had the opportunity to be a father while I was in
high school. It was the fall of1980, and my daughter, Kathy,
was born while I was finishing my senior year. I graduated
98
high school at the end of May 1981
and immediately started summer
school in electrical engineering at
Tennessee Tech. I had a good background
in math, but otherwise, I was
behind. Engineering school was hard
for me, but failure was not an option. I
had a wife and little girl to support.
So, I studied all the time, and I did
manage to make good grades. In
1983, my second daughter, Stephanie,
was born. I made it through college by
working a lot, funding from Pell grants, and about $3000 in
student loans. I remember doing electromagnetics homework
until 2:00 am, getting four hours of sleep, and getting up in
time to put food out for service in the cafeteria at 6:00 am.
Tennessee Tech was very good for me. It was a hard time,
but I faced a lot of challenges and I persevered. I started college
unable to solve rather simple problems and graduated a
much more mature thinker. I finished my B.S. in electrical
engineering in 1985 with honors and started my M.S. degree
as a research assistant in robotics. Choosing to pursue my M.
S. degree was a very good decision. I continued my growth in
problem solving, and the faculty at Tennessee Tech was great
forme.My advisor, JoeAnderson, was really helpful in teaching
me about the research process and publishing your work.
My Advanced Calculus teacher, Alice Mason, was one of
most pivotal teachers, and I have had some good teachers in
my life. In Advanced Calculus, we proved the fundamental
theorems in calculus, and she graded my homework and tests
thoroughly. If a miracle occurred in one of my proofs, she
caught it and took points for it. Dr. Mason also taught me that
curving a zero by an arbitrary percentage is still a zero. My
three Advanced Calculus classes taught to convince myselfof
the correctness ofa solution to a problem, and that has served
me well. Dr. P. K. Rajan taught my graduate DSP class and
gave the class six DFT problems and six FFT problems
from Oppenheim and Schafer as a project. We worked all
semester, and we still did not finish the problems. Every
student, save one, took incompletes and worked the summer
to finish those problems, of which I would learn later
were masters' theses. Barry Wilmore, who piloted the next
to the last Shuttle mission, was in that class too. Dr. Rajan
was a great teacher who focused on the student's education.
He brought six legal pages of questions on robotics to my
master's defense. He wanted a tutorial on robotics and got
one on that Saturday afternoon. Some people were aghast
at the long list of questions that he had for me. I was not.
He took his time to prepare a list and spend about two hours
of his time on Saturday listening to me answer them. This
experience shaped my professional life.
Peter: After college, did you start work immediately at
NSWC Dahlgren? Tell us about your career there. And
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JANUARY 2023
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