Heirs To The Legacy

In retirement, Steve Warford began to ponder two questions from late in his career: "How many third-graders does it take to make one engineer?" and "How did the Cold War, Arms Race, and Space Race affect my decision to become an engineer?" What began as a personal memoir, twisted and turned through decades of history to become the memoir of the children of the Greatest Generation. Amid the gloom and doom of the Cold War; the paranoia of the Arms Race, and the jubilation of the Space Race, for the Silent Generation, "Life was good." Woven among the story of the people, times, and events of the era are personal stories of 20-plus "Heirs to the Legacy" across America and behind the former Iron Curtain. As industrial America and much of the rest of the world evolved from smokestacks to slide rules, the heirs experience opportunites and challenges that would propel them beyond expectations. In the author's words, as a newly-minted teenager looking up to catch a glimpse of the world's first artificial satellite, "As a young boy from a small town in Kentucky, I sense that experiences I have only read about or dreamed of will become a part of my future. Someday, somehow I will place my mark in space to join that of Sputnik."