Comments:
The essential Pete has changed in name only. Pete Swanson who bought a ’39 Ford for $10 when he was 14 and turned it into a working hotrod is now Charlie Swanson tinkering in a garage full of Porsches, two of them his. He also sends a variety of things traveling hundreds of thousands of miles in space, part of his work as mechanical engineer designing payloads and working on Space Station apparatus.
Pete follows his father as a tinkerer with machines. During the War they lived in the Buffalo/Niagara Falls area where his father was a troubleshooter for airplanes. In 1945 his father took a job with Sperry Corporation on the Island and moved the family to an old white clapboard house fronting on the rapidly vanishing steep Tilley Place just off Prospect Avenue. “My father was always tinkering with his cars and I was right there helping him.” His father was also good friends with Sandy Gleichmann’s father, a machinist, and sometimes helped him with big jobs.
Pete was learning from teachers who were doing, while in the school classroom his mind was often elsewhere, and that sometimes led to trouble. He did not like the fierce Miss Comfort who taught Spanish and English, and he didn’t like Spanish either. “Pete Muttee and I wrapped leaves around a rock and put it in the exhaust pipe of [Miss Comfort’s] car. It blew the muffler out. We made the mistake of returning to the scene of the crime. The next day we were in Furlong’s office.” One could speculate interestingly on why he remembers the prank but not the punishment. He does remember one phrase he learned, since he sat next to the door, and class often began with the command, “Carlos, cierre la puerta. [Charles, close the door.]”
Pete tried Adelphi College on the Island after graduation but says, “I just hated it.” He went back to the work he did on weekends during school—servicing cars, then moving into welding and mechanical work. He also became a union laborer on various jobs, earning more than many college grads. Nevertheless, he tired of routine jobs and in September ’61 he enrolled in the University of Alabama which offered both the warmer climate he craved and mechanical engineering. “When I got to college I decided I’d be Charlie instead of Pete.”
This time he did well in the classroom and won a fellowship to go on for his PhD, “but when I got the masters, I had enough college at that point and I bailed out.” In Melbourne, Florida he began work in structural analysis, the discipline that is still at the heart of his work. His first subjects were large antenna systems for Harris Corp.
In 1968 he married a girl he had met at the university. Their daughter was born in 1976. Pete says that their part of Florida had a bad drug scene with kids lying around the beach smoking pot. His wife said, “We’re not raising our daughter here.” They moved across country to Phoenix where he worked for Goodyear Aerospace on missiles. By 1982 they were back in Huntsville, Alabama where Pete started work with the Teledyne conglomerate where he continues to work today. His daughter graduated from the Unviersity of Alabama and went into banking and money management, taking positions in international financial crossroads like Nassau, Vienna, and Monaco.
Several years ago Pete and his wife separated and went their own ways. Although he continues to work full time, he says, “When they retire the shuttle in 2010 I guess I’ll retire.” He will continue to work on his own and other people’s Porsches. He also has found time to travel widely with his companion Marie and with a local group that makes its own travel itineraries.
