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The University of Tennessee College of Engineering 114 Perkins Hall Knoxville, TN 37996-2012 |
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| Newsletter
of the UT College of Engineering |
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Special Feature |
Editor's note: Julian R. Fleming (BS/EE '34, MS/EE'35) died on October 14, 2002. Mr. Fleming had sent us a memoir of his early days at UT and the start of his career, from which we compiled the following article.
Remembrance of Things Past
It was September, and 17-year-old Julian R. Fleming was preparing to leave his parents and three younger siblings behind in Grand Junction, Tenn. (population: 500), to pursue his dream of studying electrical engineering at The University of Tennessee. Despite having saved up his odd-job wages throughout high school, Fleming faced the perennial problem of coming up with enough money to pay his college tuition, board and other expenses, which would end up that first quarter costing young Fleming the princely sum of $235.09.Nearly half went to pay for the ROTC military uniform, required of UT's entering freshmen that fall in 1929. The rest--including $9 for a month's rent, $5 for a 10-day meal ticket, and $3 for a drafting board, T-square and triangle set--was almost gone by the end of the month. Fortunately, since he hailed from a railroad town, "there was no transportation cost, since I could get a pass on the Southern." Fleming recalls, "and all the rest was shoe leather."
Fleming, who now lives in Jackson, Tenn., recently reflected upon his early academic years, and how his departure from Grand Junction that September day nearly 75 years ago coincided with the dawning of the Great Depression.
Fleming soon found himself toiling through such classes as integral calculus and trying to keep his grades up while working to support himself. Fortunately, thanks to the college's Co-op program, he was able to work fall and spring quarters and attend class during the summer and winter--an arrangement that found him, a year later, installing underground lines for the Memphis Power and Light Company.
"One day I was working by an open manhole when a sanitary sewer exploded," says Fleming. "That manhole cover went up in the air for a hundred feet or so, spinning like a coin, and came down on its edge, going several inches into the pavement and then just standing there."
The next year Fleming worked with overhead line crews who donned footwear equipped with spurs and "worked all day hanging on their safety belts with their spurs jammed into the soft wood of the poles." The linesmen also occasionally let loose with streams of profanity that so offended the ears of nearby mothers with young children that they lodged complaints with Memphis Power and Light Company.
"Good linemen were scarce, though," says Fleming, and few if any lost their well-paying 70-cents-an-hour jobs due to the neighbor ladies' complaints.
Fleming spent much of the rest of his undergraduate years living in "the oldest and worst dormitory on campus, Humes Hall," and struggling to make ends meet.
Rescued by a teaching fellowship in 1934, Fleming graduated that fall and wrote for his thesis a study of a dam and hydro plant near the South Fork on the Cumberland River--a treatise that was subsequently purchased from Fleming by a lumber and coal company who, 40 years later, used Fleming's plan to build a hydro plant on the site.
Fleming eventually found his way to the University of Wisconsin, married, taught at the University of Iowa, earned two master's degrees, and worked in Oak Ridge for several years in the 1940s.
"After that, much of my life went to formal education," he says. "But it was worth the effort, and I've never had any regrets about wanting to become an engineer--nor about the 20 years spent in the teaching field."
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Story by Janet Tate
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