Day 1175 – We Lost a Giant

Day 1175 – We Lost a Giant

April 7, 2020

On April 5^th we lost Nat Kobitz. Not to Covid but to a weakened heart. The last time I spoke to Nat was when Bill Bigge* died. No, maybe once since then. Nat told me that he , Nat Kobitz, was a member of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of New York. He said he knew all the songs. “Go ahead, ask me,” he said.

(*Bill Bigge worked for The Bureau of Standards where he calibrated thermometers to zero, which were used by the manufacturers of thermometers to calibrate their thermometers. Bill also at one point held the World’s record for most kites on a line, and had the record for the longest flight of an indoor glider, and he had a kite that most kitefliers know Bill for, which could fly, as Bill liked to say in -4 miles an hour wind.)

The only song I could think of was “Modern Major General,” a mouthful of syllables that must be said very fast in time to the music. When I was telling Ted Manekin about my conversation with Nat about bill’s passing Ted said, “Not only that but Tom Lehrer had done a send off to MMG with different words and Nat knew the words to that as well.”

I first met Nat in 1970. It was probably at Mel and Val’s farmhouse near the Campfield school grounds, or it might have been at The Smithsonian Kite Festival where he presided as chief judge for many years, and his wife, Cynthia, was the scorekeeper. (In those days we had all kinds of crazy kite categories because Paul Garber got his friends to donate money for a trophy. I think Paul must have asked them what they wanted to sponsor and he put it down – whatever it was. This caused all kinds of judging and categorization problems (e.g. “What classification is this in: Box, Winged Box, or Cellular?” ) When we hit noon, when the festival was over we’d turn to Cynthia ask her for the winners and she’d hand us the manilla folder where she kept track of everything. In those days the festival ran from ten to noon. Two hours, we were done.  We upgraded everything, straightened out the categories, got computers and had to enter all the data. It took an extra hour or two to enter the data to figure out the winners, so we had to extend the festival. We added the Rokkaku Battle and other events and ended at an exhausting four o’clock. This I said at Cynthia’s service we called “progress.” Nat apparently loved that story.

That’s what Celia, one of Nat’s daughters told me when we chatted yesterday.

In 1970 Nat had, I believe, left NASA where he was a rocket engineer. (“Yeah, you wanna talk rocket science? Bring it.”) He was working on high speed boats as he called it. His company got absorbed by the Navy. 

One day he got a call from a senator’s office. The senator wanted to have lunch with Nat the next day. “What do you say when a senator wants to have lunch with you?” Nat asked. Before I could answer he said, “Yes sir.” (Maybe it was the same day. Yeah it was the same day. Scratch “next day” that can’t be right. You’ll see why I say that in a second.) The senator sent his limo around to pick Nat up. They pulled up to the back entrance to the White House. The guard looked in the back of the limo and said, “Senator, the President is expecting you.” And he looked at Nat and said, “You must be Kobitz.” Nat nodded. The guard waved them through. The limousine pulled up to the back of the White House where they took the elevator up to the Oval Office.

Jimmy Carter said to Nat, “Mr. Kobitz, I thought you’d want to be here when I signed your appropriations authorization.” With that Mr. Carter signed the bill that authorized Nat to design and build high speed ships for the Navy. The were called S.E.S. ships (for Surface Effect Ships.) He build a test 100 ton boat and a larger 400 ton boat. 

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_effect_ship#The_SES-100

When I last visited Nat in his home in Reisterstown Maryland I saw a model of one of his ships on a bookcase. “Isn’t that your boat that went 100 knots?” I asked.

“96,” he said (through rather gritted teeth), “I could never get it to one hundred.”

“Yeah, back then,” Nat went on, “there was this Admiral named Holliwell. We called him ‘Hollowhead’ he asked me, ‘Kobitz, what am I going to do with a 96 knot boat in a 28 knot navy?’ “

Nat’s response was, “Well, admiral I was hoping we’d make the whole navy 96 knots.” (I might have been 98 knots, I forget.)

Unbeknownst, to Nat on that day when the senator called another call came in to  Val Govig, then head of the Maryland Kite Society and instigator of the kite festival that was held at the Campfield School grounds that became, no was, known as The Maryland Kite Festival. The call came from The Baltimore Sun Papers about the upcoming kite festival. The reporter wanted to interview someone and Val suggested Nat. The reporter called Nat’s home where his wife, Cynthia, answered and suggested that the reporter come by around six because that’s about the time Nat got home. Cynthia thought it would be good to invite Curt Marshall to come over as well. 

So picture this, the reporter is sitting in a 50s designed rambler home in Reisterstown Maryland with this nice friendly middle aged woman making dinner. Curt Marshal comes in the door. Curt had a kind of rambling disinterested sort of way about him. He was a man who always seemed to be thinking about something else when he first met you. It took awhile for him to stop thinking about whatever it was and look at you.

Curt had just come back from a dive in the Seychelles. The Kobitz family had just come back from Florida where they had bought a bag of shells in a tourist trap knickknack store. The shells were displayed on a corner multi-layered shelf. This was of much more interest to Curt than whomever this lady was. After saying hello to Cynthia who was busy fixing dinner Curt went over to where the shells were and began picking up the shells, and naming them while the reporter stood there watching.

Reporter: So you’re an expert on shells?

Curt: Oh no, I just came back from a dive for National Geographic in the Seychelles.

Reporter: Oh really? So you’re a diver professionally?

Curt: No, I was a working diver and the doctor for the dive team. Back home I read brain waves.

Reporter: Really? How’s that?

Curt: It’s my job to determine when someone is legally dead in the state of Maryland so they can do organ transplants.

Reporter: Really? Why you?

Curt: Oh, I’m one of the first in the field I have 250,000 case histories under my belt, if you want to know what’s wrong you come to me. Look at this shell, it’s named …

At about this point in time Nat came through the door. 

Cynthia greeted him with a “Hi Honey, How was your day?”

Nat, “Oh nothing much, the usual, Senator so and so called me up for lunch and we got hooted down to the White House where Jimmy Carter signed my defense appropriations bill for me to build the Surface Effect Ships. And you?”

(Nat had been to the white House once before.)

Cyn, “Curt is here. This lady is from the Sun papers. She is here to interview you two about the Kite Festival. Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes.”

Somewhere I have the article that went in the paper. I’ve got to find it. It’s unlike any article on kites or kite festivals you’ve ever read. Mostly because Nat and Curt probably talked little about kites per se and more about what ever else they were interested in at the moment.

When Cynthia was still alive Shelby and I went up to see them. I wanted Shelby to understand who they were. We met at one of the old Jewish delis on Reisterstown Road. I got matzo ball soup. I thought I had had matzo ball soup before, but this was unlike anything I had ever experienced. A giant cannon ball of matzo was sitting in and taking up most of the bowl. It was delicious. So was whatever liquid was around the edges. Nat was proud of his Jewish heritage. Proud isn’t quite the proper term. It was part of him; part of who he was. That’s all. No big deal. Of course, we’d meet at a Jewish deli for a meal, where else?

Nat helped me on two big aerial sculpture projects I was involved in. One was a New Year’s celebration for New Year’s 1980. The end of a decade. This local Baltimore artist, Stan Edminster, had an idea to fly giant Mylar balloons off the top of Baltimore’s World Trade Center** in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore. 

** There are some 35 World Trade Centers at port cities in the United States. The ones that stood in New York are the most famous. Baltimore’s World Trade Center is a five sided building designed by I.M.Pei and it sits at the water’s edge in Baltimore’s Harbor between the Baltimore Aquarium and the Inner Harbor development built by The Rouse Company and the site of kite flys before that.

I was working at Western Electric in Baltimore at the time. It was part of AT&T, The Bell System, as it was known with it’s many regional telephone companies. Western Electric was the supplier of the phone equipment. I got loaned from Western Electric to the regional phone company, C&P, now known as Verizon.

I helped construct and fly the giant 60 foot tall 25 foot wide balloons. They looked like giant silver pillow cases. We were laying out the Mylar and taping it in The Baltimore Civic Center (the old one. Now known as Mariner Center. Where I also saw Janis Joplin perform [B row center! But that’s another story]) Nat came down to visit and I wanted his expertise. I wanted to make sure we weren’t missing anything.

We had laid out two sheets of silvered Mylar, one on top of the other. I was lifting the top layer from the bottom. It was a long giant graceful wave of 54” wide material. Suddenly, I got the electric shock of my life. The kind that temporarily blinds your vision and makes your gonads retreat into your body in a split second. I told Nat what had happened and he immediately started calculating the potential voltage. ( I think it was 250 volts but low enough amperage so it wouldn’t kill you. “Thanks, Nat.” ) 

As it turned out, on New Year’s Eve the local TV station brought the event live. Fireworks in the Inner Harbor. William Donald Schaeffer was the Mayor and they had him in a grandstand with a camera on him. Because I had been loaned to help with making the aerial sculptures C&P had representatives in the grandstand with the Mayor. They may have been the only representatives from any sponsoring organization. I’m not sure, but the C&P rep told me later that the Mayor kept turning to them and thanking them for their help with this event. It made it seem like they were responsible for the whole thing. The rep said they couldn’t buy publicity like that.

 I was later asked to make a large aerial sculpture to be flown in New York’s Sheep Meadow in Central Park. Naturally, I called on Nat to help. The sculpture was 44 feet in diameter. It was a six sided spooked wheel made out of silver mylar that was to be covered in Mylar so that it would look like a giant UFO with a small round module on top.(If you’ve seen “The Bean” in Chicago you have an idea of what it was like, but much bigger than The Bean.)  Nat figured out the lift and drag that a forty foot diameter disc would have been. I used that for my tethering calculations. (A ton and a half!) This was serious stuff. Especially, seeing as how Central Park is on a flight path to LaGuardia and Kennedy airports. (Captain Sully take note) and having a kite of such a design “that it could be injested by an aircraft” as the FAA said in their regulations wrote, had to get permission if it was flown over 500 feet in the air.***

***The FAA never gives permission because they don’t have any process in place to handle such requests. I kept the sculpture below 500 and watched the planes fly above us.

I remember sitting at his kitchen table with Nat trying to understand the calculations and make sure I had everything correct. Trying to get Nat to focus was the hardest thing. I remember him hearing some music, “do you know who this is?”

“No,” I said.

“Robert Merrill.”

Merrill was a famous opera and Broadway star of the 1950s.

I think Nat would have given up his career to be Zorba the Greek, or any Broadway singer. Fortunately, for us and the world I don’t think he could sing. 

At one point we diverged into Evil Knievel and his jump over the Snake River Canyon. It ended in Knievel not making it across successfully. The parachute deployed too early. “If he had only listened to me,” said Nat. It was so Jewish mother of him. 

The “he” being Bob Truax who designed the rocket motorcycle. Apparently, Nat had told Bob that given the force on take-off Knievel would not be able to hold the parachute in place with the hand brake system they were using. If they had only listened to Nat! 

When I was at the Snake River I saw from the bridge over the highway the ramp that Knievel used. I took a picture of it and of the plaque commemorating the event that was at the near-by visitor’s center and sent it to Nat.

In the middle of the interview with the woman from the Sun Nat had gotten a call. A friend was trying to tune a Jaguar. It had three timed four barrel carburetors on it. While Curt was telling this woman the ichthyological names of shells Nat was in the kitchen saying, “Listen, I told you it’s nearly impossible to tune the third throat on the second carb.” 

Did I mention that Nat had done crash testing of cars in the 1950s and had determined that everyone should wear seatbelts? He used to install them cars for friends before the manufacturers were doing it. “You know we had no problem killing our dummies at 23 miles per hour…”

If you find that this screed jumps around it’s because that’s the way Nat was. I’m sure he and Pete Ianuzzi must have had conversations. Pete had been an underwater engineer and had tried to convince Admiral Richover to build deeps diving bells out of titanium. The admiral had turned down the idea. They had always used stainless steel. A decade later Richover was making the hulls of subs out of titanium. I used to wonder what our navy would look like today if they hadn’t killed Nat’s program. Something they didn’t dare do until he was out of the country in Japan.

Imagine our 28 knot navy (still!) out running torpedoes and being fast enough to dodge on coming missiles, like the ones the Chinese have. Imagine.

Nat once told me at a sea trial in San Francisco Bay the admiral’s ship was crossing the path they were about to take. They asked the admiral’s ship to give way. The admiral’s ship came back that they’d be out of the way in twenty minutes. They replied that in twenty minutes they’d be out past the Golden Gate Bridge and back in. The admirals ship gave way. “We only went 48 knots,” said Nat. “There were four and a half foot seas.”

Nat did his own calculations on climate change. He thought it was all bunk. He also was a big fan of Trump.

Out of respect for Nat I will not today go on about what I think of our current president. When I last saw Nat it was at the funeral home for Cynthia.

“There he is,” he said looking at me, “the enemy.” He smiled.

Celia, his daughter tried to tell him, if he kept that up he wouldn’t have any friends left. 

I had been thinking of Nat a lot in the last few weeks. I meant to call him. 

Dammit.

(And I haven’t even told you about the Baker-Schmidt Camera shutter or how he saved a woman’s career in the Navy. Well, another time.)

PPS At least I think that’s Nat. Maybe not. I held off publishing this until I could be sure (or find another photo off him) and then I thought, “No, Nat would love the irony if that picture wasn’t him.” RIP my friend.

Photo Credit Anneke Davis