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Founder’s Day – April 4, 2008
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and thank you, Joe [Cuneo], for that introduction.
I would like to thank the school and especially Professor Hennings, who contacted and advised me, for the tremendous honor of being asked to speak here tonight on Founder’s Day. It is a humbling experience, given the amazing man whom we remember and honor today, and the individuals whom I can just imagine have spoken here in years past, for me to also be a speaker.
When Professor Hennings first called me, I was sure there had been a mistake. First, my own classmate Keith Michel spoke just last year, and it surprised me that the school would want someone else from the Class of ’73 in the year immediately following. Further, Keith is a real trustee on the Webb Board of Trustees and is also now the President-Elect of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, a very prestigious position, while I’m only an ex officio member of the board by virtue of being President of the Alumni Association, and I’m only a Vice Presidential candidate for the American Society of Naval Engineers. And by the way, if any of you are ASNE members, and all students here at Webb are ASNE student members by virtue of being student members of SNAME, please vote for the other guy! CAPT Dave Lewis can’t possibly be as busy as I am, since he has an army of contractors working for him, while I am a contractor!
Now, just how did I get to be the president of the Alumni Association? Well, remember Keith Michel, my classmate and good friend. When he called me 10 years ago to make me an offer, I should have remembered that despite the fact that I got better grades than him, he was a heck of a lot smarter than I was. Keith informed me that he had been asked to run for the alumni association position of secretary-treasurer., but he was extremely busy with SNAME affairs and didn’t think he could do both. I on the other hand, was only our Webb class agent. For those of you who may not know, each graduated class has a class agent who is the link with the Annual Webb Alumni Fund and is responsible for trying to coordinate and boost class participation and giving. Keith suggested that I run for secretary-treasurer instead and he would take over as class agent, a job I had held for much of the 25 years we had been out of school. I was ready for a change, so I said "Sure!" It was only afterwards that I learned that there was a long standing tradition within the AA that one progressed from S-T to 2nd Vice President, and then 1st Vice President, and then finally President, with the whole pipeline lasting for NINE YEARS! So here I am, almost a decade later, looking forward to Homecoming in May when I turn over the presidency and exit the WAA Executive Committee. However, honestly, it has been a wonderful and rewarding experience in all of the jobs, especially during the last two years when I have been on the Board of Trustees as well, and I am very pleased that I had the chance to do it. I have met many great alumni, staff, faculty, and board members who make up the Webb family. Accordingly, I encourage all of you to accept the offer if the call ever comes. Accepting calls to serve, and looking for opportunities to serve, are elements of my theme and message tonight, but more on that in a moment.
I feel I should tell you more about myself than the fact that I’m president of the AA and that I might soon be a VP for ASNE. Believe me when I say that it is uncomfortable for me to do this, because I think the people in here who know me would vouch that I am a very modest person who doesn’t normally talk about what I have accomplished. However, I think it will be relevant to the message I want to leave you with, so please bear with me.
Let me tell you what I am going to tell you, which I will summarize at the end again. My message is this. First, you as future Webb graduates (and I am focusing mostly on you students, because the rest of the older folks in the room certainly don’t need any advice from me) should strive to be leaders in whatever fields of endeavor you pursue in life – professional, academic, recreational, community – and to seek to make long if not lasting contributions to all of those enterprises in which you participate. If you are not comfortable being a leader, than at least be a player. Second, you should do it not because you owe it to our founder William Webb, which you do, but because you owe it to yourselves, for the rewards that it will bring. I’ll make that point clearer in a minute.
Back to me. When I was in high school, I had only one, all consuming goal in life: Go to the Naval Academy, become a naval officer, and grow up to command ships at sea. What I now refer to as being a "boat driver." There was only one problem: I was color blind. I knew it, but I hoped the Navy admission process wouldn’t notice. After all, they didn’t notice that Roger Staubach, the Naval Academy’s most famous quarterback, and one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history, was color blind, so maybe I could sneak by. Well, I couldn’t. The Navy had multiple ways to catch color blindness and that got me every time, because after I failed the Naval academy physical, I went back and tried for Kings Point, and then for NROTC and then the Coast Guard Academy. But I didn’t stand a chance of getting in any of them.
The amazing fact however was that being color blind was, I am convinced, not a curse, but a blessing, an act of Divine Providence. God knew better than me, obviously, what I should do to make the most of my life, and that was to come to Webb and to become a naval architect.
So I came to Webb and survived and was quite prepared to spend a life designing ships, when in my junior year I learned, quite by accident, and while walking in the very front door of Webb, that one right over there, one Saturday night. I overheard a senior talking about joining the navy as an Engineering Duty Officer, and my ears perked up. One thing led to another and one year after graduating from Webb, I graduated from Officer Candidate School and was commissioned as an ensign in the Engineering Duty Community and assigned to a 1200-psi steam powered guided missile destroyer as the Main Engines Officer. This began a full career as an Engineering Duty Officer that lasted for 22 years.
What do ED’s, as we are known, do? Well, the ED’s, and there are only about 1000 of them in the Navy, are responsible for the design, construction, maintenance, conversion, and eventual decommissioning, of the Navy’s ships. You are probably aware that two of your faculty members are also ex-ED’s like I am. I encourage you to talk to them about it. Or talk to me. It is a terrific career path.
As far as I know, there have only been three Webb graduates in the last 40 years who became true ED’s, and I actually only know one of the other two personally. I am not talking about Webb graduates who joined the Navy and became Nuclear Power officers. I believe there have been a few of them, although I’ve never met one. Moreover, they would be boat drivers, and not part of the ED Community.
So all through the 1970’s and 1980’s there were the two of us that I knew who were Webb graduates among the 1000 ED’s. There were also a dozen or two ED’s who had a post-graduate degree from Webb, from when Webb had a PG program in the 1950’s and 60’s, and they were an impressive bunch also.
Being somewhat unique, and due to Webb’s reputation, I know I received some special notice while serving in the Navy. I easily made it into MIT when the Navy offered to send me there, which it did after only three years on active duty. I went into the "13A" program as it was called for many years and got my masters in naval architecture and marine engineering as well as an Ocean Engineer degree. Being a Webbie, I was excused that first very hard summer at MIT from having to do the infamous lines drawing, because I had already done plenty of lines drawing at Webb. Instead, the Navy professors had me become the "lines drawing advisor" to my classmates, which meant helping them understand the difference between a buttock line and a waterline and a diagonal. Summers in Boston can be unbearably hot and humid, which is the worst kind of weather to have when you are working with paper and pencil in an un-air conditioned classroom. There’s almost nothing worse than trying to get two or three lines to pass through a common point on the paper when all of a sudden a great drop of sweat falls from one’s face and lands squarely on that spot of paper, which has already been weakened by excessive erasing. It was times like that when I understood why the institute’s architects designed the windows so that you could not easily jump out of them. When one of these sweat events occurred, I would watch a fellow officer’s wild and crazed eyes roam first to the windows, and then to the door, and then to me. We both knew what he was thinking: the window jump was too hard, but a few steps past that door was the balcony encircling and overlooking the huge front entrance hall of the main building under the great dome, and it might be a quick and painless death to hurl oneself over the railing onto the stone pavement below. If I thought the risk was very great, I would distract him like you can always distract an MIT student, by giving him a physics problem. Something like, "Bill, if each floor of this building is 15 feet high and you are on the third floor, and the balcony railing is 42 inches high, what would be your impact velocity when you hit the floor below if you jumped. Work it out in your head to three decimal places." It worked every time. They would start cranking away in their mind and forget about suicide and eventually they would happily turn back to their drawing.
Being a Webbie, let me tell any and all of your thinking about going to MIT: You already will know everything and more about ship design than you will learn there. A Webbie does not go to MIT to learn more naval architecture and marine engineering. He or she goes to learn something else. I love MIT. It is a fantastic place of research and learning. It is a great school to attend for graduate work. Its faculty includes numerous Nobel Prize winners. When you walk down the hallways, you will recognize professor’s names on doors as the authors of some of your Webb textbooks. But MIT just doesn’t hold a candle to Webb when it comes to traditional naval architecture and marine engineering. Therefore, I shined in those courses.
And word got out about the Webbie Engineering Duty Officer, and a few years later I was told that I was the "obvious" (!) choice to return to MIT to teach there as one of the two naval Engineering Duty officers on the faculty of the Ocean Engineering Department, assigned by the Navy to teach naval ship design and ship acquisition. That was a three year assignment as a commander, and it was positively awesome. I’m sure I would have not gotten it if I wasn’t from Webb. When I left there, I had the perfect job in the Navy as an ED: I transferred to the office of the Navy Supervisor of Shipbuilding in San Diego as the New Construction Project Officer at National Steel Shipbuilding Company, or NASSCO. I was the Program Manager’s Representative for the construction of the AOE 6 Class Fast Replenishment ships and for the conversion of MAERSK container ships into Military Sealift Command RO/RO ships for army transport, and for the new construction of large, medium speed, RO/RO ships also for MSC. The latter ships were more commercial than military, classed by ABS, and my background from Webb again gave me knowledge than few of my fellow Navy associates possessed. At one point, I was overseeing $2B of US Navy construction and conversion contracts at NASSCO. At the same time, I was the chairman of the San Diego Section of ASNE. Therefore, I had a lot of visibility, and I mentioned the fact that I was a Webb grad whenever I could, and having done it in a nice way, no one took it negatively, and in most situations where the other person knew about Webb, their reaction would be, "Of course." Because that is the reputation for technical and managerial leadership that Webbies have earned.
After 22 years I retired from the Navy, but not really retired. I got snapped up by a former fellow student from Webb who was president of the naval architecture firm, Designers and Planners, and I have been at D&P for 11 years now, and I am currently a Vice President. One of my customers is a Coast Guard civilian engineer who came to the US from another country many years ago as a degreed NA himself. He recently told me that based on his 40 years in the business of ship design and ship acquisition, there are only two kinds of American naval architects who are worth their salt and can be depended upon to do good work and complete projects: those from Webb and those from the other place, Michigan.
I have only briefly mentioned some examples of the many situations in my life where being a Webbie has made a big difference in my life, and I hope I haven’t bored you with them. I took it upon myself to become an officer knowing that if I was successful and good at it, I would have leadership positions by definition. I took it upon myself to be very active in a professional society, first SNAME, but mostly in ASNE. Besides being section chair of San Diego, I have been chair of the Washington Flagship section, and have served on the ASNE National Council, and am on the Scholarship Committee (and yes, this week, am reviewing scholarship applications from Webb students). I also chair an Ad Hoc Committee for the Lester and Mandel Rosenblatt Bequest Award. I have done these things because I felt and feel strongly that I owe it to Webb and to the other great men and women who have made magnificent contributions to the field of ship design and naval engineering. Moreover, it has enabled me to get to know literally hundreds of talented and interesting people in our business. It seems to me to be the least I can do, because of my Webb education, when one considers what our Founder did.
Let me put it into some perspective by quoting from the wonderful biography of William Webb written by Webb Professor Edwin Dunbaugh and William duBarry Thomas of the Class of ’51. First, from the foreword by Peter Sanford, President of the National Maritime Historical Society:
"[speaking of William Webb] to be a leader in shipping was to be a leader in America – and certainly in New York, America’s leading seaport. …What does such a man leave behind him? Well, a large and devoted family, for one thing. And in an unassuming but distinctly patriarchal way, he set up the Webb Institute to give shelter to the old and infirm, and education to young people in his line of work – they were all, one feels, his family."
I find it such a remarkable act of generosity for a very wealthy and successful businessman to remember the old workers with whom he worked alongside as a youth in his father’s shipyard, and to remember what it was like to try and learn the art of ship design at the end of long and tiring days. I don’t know of any other famous businessmen who did the same. Does anyone know of the "Home for Infirmed Auto Workers" or the "Home for Retired Farm Workers"?
We continue to speak today of the Webb family. If you remain active in Webb affairs, which you can do through the alumni association, you will learn how accurate that expression is.
About the biography itself, which is a great read, Mr. Robert Young, Chairman Emeritus of Webb Institute of Naval Architecture, wrote in the foreword, "This book came about because of unbroken affection for and gratitude to Mr. Webb that graduates of Webb Institute have felt through the century since his foresight brought forth the institution bearing his name." I know that I speak for many Webbies when I say that we do truly feel not only gratitude, but also affection, for this generous man who had such vision.
Mr. Webb was an active participant if not a founding member in many charitable, benevolent, and social initiatives in New York City, and was one of the founders and first vice presidents of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers. He donated an immense amount of the extensive land that he owned to the "Webb Academy" to ensure its existence forever. In his own words during the dedication ceremony on May 5, 1894, he stated, referring to the original location in the Bronx overlooking the Harlem River:
"It is a remarkably healthy location. The land forming this park has already been deeded to Webb’s Academy and Home for Shipbuilders, and now I give and bequeath to said Trustees, this building in which we now are, together with all other buildings or fixtures on the premises, to be held by them and their successors forever, and for the purposes set forth in the charter under which they are organized. May they accept and receive them in the spirit in which I give them, cherish, and maintain this Institution for the benefit of the young and the old, remembering they will always have the poor and needy with them.…All these [lands], it is estimated and believed, will prove fully sufficient to support and maintain Webb’s Academy and Home for Shipbuilders, in accordance with its charter, and so long as our country may need shipbuilders."
Well, our country still needs shipbuilders, and ship designers, and so we renew our commitment to serve this institute and the profession we have chosen. We do it to pay our debt to Mr. Webb for what he has given us individually and collectively as a nation. I urge you to be active and leaders in our profession and in your communities, following the model of Mr. Webb, not only because you owe it to Mr. Webb, but as much because you owe it to yourselves for the meaningful rewards such activity will bring to you, and the continued prestige it will bring to our alma mater.
Thank you.
Rich Celotto ‘73
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