Retired Navy Captain Joseph K. Taussig Jr. was known for his moxie in forcing the military to reduce the dangers pilots and sailors face.
It only made sense that to make his case, he once set a uniform on fire in his boss' office.
Indignant that pilots were being issued flammable flight suits while race car drivers could buy fireproof gear off the shelf, Captain Taussig marched in to see the secretary of the Navy. He took a pilot's suit, a fire-proof suit, and a blowtorch.
When the flame hit the fabric, his point was made.
Captain Taussig, who died in 1999, was a World War II hero who refused to leave his post during the attack on Pearl Harbor, even after his leg was shattered by Japanese fire.
He later became a legend for his innovative thinking. Today, he's credited with saving hundreds of lives by bucking the Navy bureaucracy.
Officials at the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis named their executive suite after him last week, saying Captain Taussig embodied their ideals.
The Naval Institute, located on the Naval Academy grounds, is an independent organization founded in 1873 to look for creative solutions to challenges the Navy faces.
The family and friends of Captain Taussig recently set up a fund at the Naval Institute to advance the institute's efforts.
"Ships that don't make waves aren't under way," said retired Marine Corps Major General Thomas L. Wilkerson, the Naval Institute CEO, in describing Captain Taussig's approach to solving problems.
Of course, making waves is risky business in the military establishment, Gen. Wilkerson acknowledged.
"It can be Kamikaze; it can be suicidal," he said. "The food chain is alive and well."
As a deputy assistant secretary of the Navy and special assistant from 1981 to 1993, Captain Taussig, by then a civilian, was in charge of the Navy's Office of Safety and Survivability.
Navy Admiral Stanley R. Arthur, speaking from Florida, laughed when recalling Captain Taussig's tenacity. Their duties in the Pentagon overlapped for about a decade, said Admiral Arthur, who commanded U.S. Naval Forces Central Command for Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm.
"Joe was the master of finding a way to fix things," Admiral Arthur said. "He convinced the secretary of the Navy to give him a slush fund to try out one-of-a-kind innovative devices" which he would find in the private sector and "drag it into the Navy."
"His dogged pursuit sometimes came into conflict with the carefully laid plans of the budgeteers," Admiral Arthur said.
One of Captain Taussig's accomplishments was pushing the Navy into equipping helicopters with portable breathing apparatuses—canisters of compressed air—that gave pilots five crucial minutes for executing an escape after crashing into water.
Civilian divers had been using these devices for years, and Captain Taussig said the Navy was wasting important time—and killing people—by "studying" the problem.
He used discretionary funds to purchase some of the canisters, shaming procurement officers into ordering 8,400 of the devices in 1986.
At least 140 pilots have attributed their survival to Captain Taussig's doggedness.
"I am alive today due in no small manner to your direct support and influence," crash survivor Navy pilot lieutenant Gregory LaFave wrote to Captain Taussig.
In another legendary story, when one procurement officer asked Captain Taussig to slow down and let government regulations work their way through a problem, Captain Taussig responded that he would wait-if the procurement officer would agree to go with him to see the family of the next sailor who died while the problem was being studied.
Captain Taussig never heard back from the procurement officer.
The Annapolis resident also spoke up when he saw that Anne Arundel County firefighters, but not Navy sailors, wore special suits that let them get closer to the flames.
The difference meant that sailors could only contain fires and could not aggressively extinguish them.
Captain Taussig also saw a related problem: civilian firefighters used heat-imaging equipment that helped them see through smoke, to the source of a fire. If the Navy had such equipment, he reasoned, sailors could hit fires at their source, thereby extinguishing them sooner.
"Most fires start in high-rent districts of a ship," like control rooms, said Coast Guard Captain Richard F. Healing, a staff member who worked for Captain Taussig. "If you let the fire burn out, you let the fire burn out the expensive heart of the ship."
Because of Captain Taussig's thinking, the Navy's yearly losses because of fire aboard ships, over a two-year period in the late 1980s, went from more than $180 million a year to less than $1 million, Captain Healing said.
Former secretary of the Navy John Lehman, who supported Captain Taussig's drive for fireproof suits for pilots, was unavailable for comment last week.
While other Navy officials sometimes frowned on Captain Taussig's antics, the enlisted men showed their affection for the old warrior by giving him a service dress blue jacket that bore his captain's rank on the right sleeve, and that of a master chief petty officer on the left.
The people who knew Captain Taussig best said he rarely encountered a situation that overwhelmed him. "Let's get going," he would say.
"He was an amazing man and fun to live with," said his widow, Betty Carney Taussig. "He used humor when situations got bogged down."
She fondly recalled some of the "battles" that her husband, who headed the Naval Institute in the early 1950s, had with her father, Admiral Robert B. Carney, a member of the Academy's class of 1916.
One heated exchange arose when Captain Taussig sent Admiral Carney a letter discussing naval issues. He had his secretary initial the letter, but one does not send an admiral letters over a secretary's initials, Mrs. Taussig said laughing.
The son of a vice admiral and the grandson of a rear admiral, bolh Academy graduates, Captain Taussig graduated from the Academy in 1941.
On Dec. 7 of that year, he was the officer of the deck on the battleship Nevada [BB-36] in Pearl Harbor. A steel fragment, or a Japanese bullet, shattered the bone in his left leg.
The young ensign continued directing fire against the enemy. He received the Navy Cross, the Navy's highest medal for valor.
Captain Taussig spent four years in hospitals and underwent 19 operations, four of them amputations, said his son, former Marine Captain Joseph K. Taussig III, who graduated from the Academy in 1966.
"He was bored to death, so what he did was go get a law degree at George Washington University," Mr. Taussig said.
Armed with that law degree, Captain Taussig sued to keep the Navy from forcing him out on a medical discharge, a fight he lost in 1954.
He often joked that he was the only one-legged man in the Navy for 13 years.
While working in the Pentagon in the 1980s, Captain Taussig remembered that hospitals such as Bethesda Naval and Walter Reed Army were filled with capable young officers undergoing rehabilitation for injuries.
He recruited them to help him locate and procure devices he thought would reduce the dangers that sailors face. It helped many of the injured officers find a reason to carry on.
"The reason I am successful in my career, in my marriage, with my kids, is what Joe taught me," said New Jersey stockbroker Michael Carberry, a former Marine Corps pilot who worked with Captain Taussig for two years while recovering from an auto accident.
"He taught me to look at things with a more critical eye; don't accept things the way they are," Mr. Carberry said.
Captain Taussig continued to influence those who came after him, and not only did his own son graduate from the Academy in 1966, but a grandson graduated in 1993.
A handful of Captain Taussig's classmates attended the dedication ceremony last week. Retired Navy Cmdr. Frank McDonald recalled seeing his old friend after he started wearing an artificial leg.
"He was always bouncing around on that thing and saying, 'Let's get going.'"