I was invited to a banquet in February for a retiring professor at the University of California at Irvine. As my friend and I stepped into the reception hall, we were greeted by the chancellor of the university and the honoree, Prof. Jack Yellott. Something was bothering me as we proceeded into the crowded banquet room. Prof. Yellott had been the chair of the cognitive science department and was highly respected in his field and at the university. The name Jack Yellott, however, was ricocheting in my mind when I suddenly remembered that the graduation speaker who spoke to our engineering class at the University of Delaware in 1948 had been named Yellot.

In 1948, he was working for a group that was trying to make coal flow and burn like diesel oil for use in modern locomotives. The motivation, at that time, was that all of the known oil resources would be exhausted in 17 years, but there was enough coal in the world to last well over 100 years.

His parting words were that he would give any of us $5,000 to help him come up with a solution to the problem. Well, of course, I realized as I looked at the honoree that this could not have been our speaker because he was too young, but the name was so unusual that I thought he might be related.

Finally, I was able to broach him on the subject. Imagine my surprise when he said that our speaker had been his father and that he was 10 years old at that time. He went on to say his father's program ran into several difficulties. They found that coal ash pitted the turbine blades of the locomotive engines while many new oil fields were being discovered, making the price of oil cheaper than coal. Jack Yellott Jr. went on to say that his father then became involved in the use of solar power for heating and air conditioning and they eventually had a solar home in Arizona.

Chosing not to follow his father's footsteps in engineering, Jack Yellott Jr. pursued humanities at Stanford, where he received his Ph.D.

The evening, needless to say, turned out to be a pleasant surprise, giving me great pleasure to meet this brilliant and delightfully friendly person who was able to bring closure to my question, "Whatever happened to Jack Yellot?"

--James V. Powers, EG '48