This html article is produced from an uncorrected text file through optical character recognition. Prior to 1940 articles all text has been corrected, but from 1940 to the present most still remain uncorrected. Artifacts of the scans are misspellings, out-of-context footnotes and sidebars, and other inconsistencies. Adjacent to each text file is a PDF of the article, which accurately and fully conveys the content as it appeared in the issue. The uncorrected text files have been included to enhance the searchability of our content, on our site and in search engines, for our membership, the research community and media organizations. We are working now to provide clean text files for the entire collection.
In 1932, after I had spent nearly three years in a destroyer out on the China station, it was time for shore duty, and I was ordered to the University of California at Berkeley as an assistant professor in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC). When I got there, I noticed right away that the navigation course was deficient in piloting. So I went to see the exec. I told him that I thought the course was not teaching ship piloting, and some students were taking the course because they owned small boats. There was nothing in the curriculum about buoys, soundings, lighthouse bearings, channels, sandbars, or reefs. He said, “Okay, while all the rest of us are on Christmas leave, you can write up a new course to commence 3 January. Have it all finished and mimeographed, laid out by weeks for a semester, including piloting.” That’s the last suggestion I ever made to him. All hands got Christmas vacation but me.
The tour at California University was challenging—a new life. We had our Bohemians there the same as they have hippies now, but there was no violence. I used to make speeches before the chemistry club and other campus activities on patriotism in the service and Navy experiences. They were usually very well received with the exception of a communist heckler now and then. I tried to make my classes interesting enough to make the men want to become reserve officers in the Navy.
I had the misfortune of losing a son at childbirth, and it happened at the beginning of the summer session. For that reason 1 was exempt from going on a summer cruise to Alaska with the midshipmen. That is how 1 was loaned to the university astronomy department to teach non-Navy students. In the summer class, I found myself with people who were trying to gather credits—school teachers trying to improve their professional position by getting science credits that they had missed when they were studying too much liberal arts. 1 had yachtsmen who were trying to learn how to keep from running aground. I even had a merchant sea captain. He was a white-haired old man, and he sat in the back row of the class that taught how to take sextant readings of the sun, and how to compute them into lines of position on the chart. Most of the old windjammer seamen can get a latitude at high noon, but they don’t know enough about their longitude. This old sea dog came to me and said, “For 40 years I’ve been going to sea. I never knew what I did. Now I find out.” He knew a lot of rules of thumb in navigation, but he never knew it was based on a spherical triangle.
We had in the NROTC some splendid men who expected to go to sea on warships, but who had had no engineering studies. These were NROTC people who wanted to learn something about engineering, but didn’t take it in their regular work. They were taking anything to get through college. Some majored in football and girls.
I was asked to put on a course in electrical engineering by the lecture method. It hadn’t been done before. I gathered those fellows together and started right from simple amperage and voltage. We went through basic electrical engineering concentrating on machinery that’s on board a ship. We made it informal with no grades. They all took notes. I did all the work, but it was rewarding to me.
When I gave a lecture I moved around demonstrating. With a blackboard 20 feet long, I would run from one end to the other with chalk in each hand. I just couldn’t help it. I loved to teach and could draw perfect circles on the boards in astronomy class just using my elbow as a fulcrum. Nobody ever left my class early. In electrical engineering, I used to take the boys down to the main power plant on the campus and show them where the electricity came from that went to their classrooms, how to read the meters, the turbines that ran the alternators, and what the difference was between alternators and generators. They really got interested in it.
Being loaned to the university as an assistant professor in the astronomy department, my first class had about six people in it. As soon as students heard that I didn’t require them to do heavy mathematics, the class started to grow. 1 would derive a cosine-haver- sine formula, which would take me 15 minutes on the board, just to show them it could be done and was true.
The cosine-haversine formula is a means of getting the distance between where the sun actually is and where 4 should be according to your sea posl' tion. They saw that I did all the work' and all they had to do was be convinced, to memorize the formula, and apply it to the practical readings ot ® sextant.
I loved to run around the classroom- One fellow would be over there hold' ing up a marble and I would say, “That’s the earth.” Another fellow would be over here holding up an orange—that’s the sun. Another would be Polaris (North Star). It took drama ics to drive home a celestial triangle- They were bug-eyed.
One other thing I did was take my astronomy class out to the football sta dium at night. Those people would come out and sit in the bleachers at night while I identified the stars. The) would eventually all be able to po>n’ out some 30 stars. We stayed there by the hour naming stars, identifying by constellations or by color—red stars, blue stars, white stars, yellow stars^ and how to tell the planets from the stars. When you’re navigating, m°st^ the sky may be covered by clouds, a only one high magnitude star comes out. A good navigator, especially sin he’s viewed the same sky the night before when it was clear, can tell pretty well what that star is. This was the first time that seagoing star iden • cation had been taught in the astronomy department. ;
My class grew to 48 people—it w the largest astronomy class they ever had there. The head of the departnic'11 came around and wanted to know where I got all my applicants. I sald’ “Just send somebody in to audit thei class and you’ll find out.” So they dl I would do all the spherical trig my* self. Then I would show the students how to apply it, and that’s all I required, so the word got around. homework, except to believe what • said and remember what I said.
This excerpt is a slightly edited vers'0 of a Naval Institute ora! history inter^ view of Admiral Tarbuck, conducted October 1970 by Commander Etta , Belle Kitchen. To obtain a catalog^ the entire collection of oral memoirs now on file, write to Director of Or History, U. S. Naval Institute, Ann°P lis, Maryland 21402.
94
Proceedings / October
19*3