H. D. (“Don”) Conway
3 December 1917- 31 May 2007
H. D. Conway, or “Don” as he was universally known, was remarkably productive for a phenomenally long span. He began his working life in 1934 as an “indentured engineering apprentice” at a British shipyard, being paid just 50 cents per week –for laboring 7 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Monday to Friday plus Saturday mornings. His last appointment -- a labor of love tutoring undergraduates-- occurred seventy years later at Cornell with only slightly better pay. In between, Don was on the Engineering College faculty from 1947 until his official retirement in 1988; he remained active in the department for fifteen years more-- teaching, advising and mentoring.
Don was born in Chatham, England, 30 miles southeast of London, as World War I ended. His father, of Irish parents living in Scotland, was an enlisted man in the Royal Marine Light Infantry and his mother an English homemaker. After secondary education, Don joined the sprawling Chatham dockyard and, five years later, he had become an electrical fitter, laying cables on dry-docked ships. During the early years of World War II, with still no academic training but considerable engineering experience, he was a stress analyst supporting the design of the Royal Air Force’s Sterling bomber. To Don’s surprise, the government acceded to his request to attend the University of London, then displaced to Cambridge by Germany’s blitz bombing of Britain’s capital. By 1942 he had earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering with first-class honors. Don then joined the National Physical Laboratory to continue war-motivated studies of the stresses in jet engines and gun barrels, and he simultaneously went forward with his education. While serving on an overnight fire watch for German bomb damage, he met his future wife Dorothy, a clerical assistant. The University of London granted him a Ph.D in structural mechanics at the war’s end, followed by a D.Sc. in 1949 for his published work. He was appointed as a “University demonstrator” in engineering at Cambridge University, which awarded Don an M.A. in 1946. Based on his research publications, he received a Sc. D. from Cambridge University in 1971.
Don Conway joined the Department of Engineering Mechanics within the Sibley School of Mechanical Engineering as an Associate Professor in 1947. When hired by Cornell, he was a rising European star in classical elasticity and structural mechanics, and thus represented a new breed of faculty within the College of Engineering. Before World War II, U.S. engineering education was centered on “engineering practice”—with professors at that time mostly devoted to teaching, professional case studies and consulting. Don and others, such as J. N. Goodier who preceded him to Cornell, were instead expected to carry out scholarly research along with their teaching responsibilities. Over the years, this trend continued and Don’s department transitioned into an independent Engineering Mechanics and Materials department, and then in the mid-sixties to today’s Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (T&AM).
Don returned to England on his inaugural sabbatical leaves, both at Imperial College, in 1953-1954 as a Guggenheim Fellow and in 1961-1962 as an NSF Senior Postdoctoral Fellow. In the academic year 1958-1959, Ohio State (like many other universities) tried to lure him with the Julius Stone Professorship. These three leaves were his only extended stays out of Ithaca. He moved in 2004 to Florida to consult with his youngest son Peter. Geoff Conway and wife Sally live in North Reading, Massachusetts, with two sons. Don had raised the two boys, both engineering graduates, after Dorothy’s passing in 1976.
Don performed stress analysis for companies such as General Electric, Battelle Memorial Institute, North American Aviation and Union Carbide. His strongest consulting association, with IBM-Endicott, began in 1961 and endured more than twenty years. Even as a technical consultant, Don was the consummate teacher, educating engineers about available historical solutions, new problem-solving approaches and the true meaning of complex analytical results.
Throughout his decades on the faculty, Don taught undergraduate courses in strength of materials and graduate courses in classical elasticity that were primarily taken by civil and mechanical engineers. Working from notes penciled on ruled, yellow paper, and preparing a beautifully organized blackboard, Don educated students about stress and strain, St. Venant’s torsion and the bi-harmonic equation. He gave clear lectures, occasionally illuminating them with slides of renowned mechanicians, plus some funny anecdotes and corny jokes. Don added humorous tales of real-world engineering and provided practical advice about technical topics but life too. The students loved Don and their affection was fully reciprocated. Once, when a co-teacher got upset with undergraduate antics, Don said, “They’re God’s children, and good lads, too, you know.”
As a professor, Don was recognized as deeply involved with his graduate and undergraduate students, and very generous with his time. He often ranked among the top 10% of the college’s educators, and in 1987-- just before his first (i.e., official) retirement-- he became the first T&AM professor to receive the Engineering College’s highest teaching honor, the prize. Don supervised nearly fifty Ph.D. and M.S. students, many of whom became leaders in academia and industry around the globe.
Professor Conway published more than two hundred research papers, his second appearing in the prestigious Philosophical Magazine in 1946, and his last pair being published 55 years later. The latter were written with C.-Y. (Herbert) Hui, a faculty colleague in T&AM who became a good friend although they were separated by thirty-five-plus years in age. At the start of his academic career Don wrote the technical treatise Aircraft Strength of Materials (Chapman and Hall, 1947) and then the textbook Mechanics of Materials (Prentice Hall, 1952).
To honor Don’s active involvement with students, Professor Andy Ruina organized and furnished the H.D. Conway study room (102 Thurston), a former lab now filled with tables and blackboards for teaching assistants and faculty to aid students on problem-solving in mechanics and mathematics. At the dedication ceremony in 1999, Don talked about “The students that I like are those who aren’t unduly gifted, but study hard. They’re the ones who use this study room. Others who get 100s all the time, you don’t see…it does my heart good to watch kids struggling and making it against great odds.” Don enjoyed his many hours spent there with students, helping them with homework problems, surely, but also listening to their dreams, difficulties and disappointments.
Even though a distinguished and productive researcher himself, Don felt that many at Cornell were overly impressed with their own research –ascribing far too much importance to it. How many of us really carry out research that has a lasting impact—that actually changes the world, he would ask? For the vast majority, it is our teaching that is our most meaningful activity—since it touches so many young people during their formative years. Sometimes, if you met Don after a student had just departed, he’d state, “Now that’s the best thing about our job, isn’t it?” Over the years, he likely taught 15,000 Cornellians.
Don’s quiet demeanor, frequent smile and interest in fellow humans had a much-appreciated and calming influence on the department during the tumultuous late sixties and seventies. Don considered himself to be Irish, more emotional than if he had been English, and he was proud of that heritage. Don had a mischievous sense of humor. For example, for many years, his office was located on the heavily traveled first floor hallway of Thurston Hall. After tolerating countless interruptions, he eventually put a sign on his office door that read: “The department office is upstairs. I do not have a stapler; I do not know who has a stapler. The men’s room is that way (<=); the ladies’ room is this way (=>).”
During Don’s middle years in town, he collected antique Ithaca Calendar Clocks, many of which decorated his office. Don shared this passion, and another for investing, with Pete Zaharis, a local merchant. They attended auctions and meetings of historical societies in Rochester and Syracuse in quest of their clocks. Pete says that Don was so sharp, so informed: “a tough shopper, who loved to make a buck by turning things over…he was so secretive about the sources of his bargains, he was like an MI5 spy.” This hobby took on car trips him across his beloved Finger Lakes.
During his last decade in Ithaca, Don continued to come to campus every weekday. His daily leisurely tour included coffee, chats with his colleagues, several stories to recall and a half-hour with The New York Times (stocks, primarily) before sitting down to help students.
When Don retired in 1988, having reached the then-mandatory retirement age, the T&AM chair wrote the Dean: “In his forty-one years at Cornell, Don has been an exemplary faculty member: he’s been an excellent teacher and advisor and, throughout his career, he’s continued as a strong researcher...Although extraordinarily productive, Don has been the easiest and most gentle faculty member in the department. He always has a kind word for staff, student and faculty, as long as they’re willing to listen to an old English saying, a joke or a line of poetry.” At Don’s death, that letter remained fully accurate, but his years of service to Cornell’s students had reached fifty-seven.
Professor Conway was a true gentleman, a gentle man, and a scholar, with a unique combination of intelligence, charm and kindness, and not an arrogant bone in his body—a “jolly good chap,” he might have said.
Edmund T. Cranch, Timothy J. Healey, Francis C. Moon, Andy Ruina, Joseph A. Burns
