Lee High School - Huntsville Alabama Alumni

The JETS:

Who Are Those Mystery Teens

and What Became of Them?

by Rainer Klauss

Class of '64

No, we weren’t some Southern version of the gang from West Side Story, ready to sing and dance as we defended our Huntsville turf. These earnest-looking and well-dressed young fellows constituted part of Lee High’s chapter of the Junior Engineering and Technical Society, a “non-profit educational organization dedicated to promoting engineering and technology careers in our nation’s young people.” Created in 1950, the organization probably had its heyday in the 1960s, after the Sputnik scare and the race to the Moon galvanized technological education in this country. It became cool and patriotic to be an engineer or to have such aspirations.

Besides myself on the bottom left-hand corner, I can identify four others in the fragmentary photo. On my left is Skip Cook. Bobby Dornbos, Ronnie Hendrix, and Edsel Hammond sit in the row above us. Tommy Faulkner gets most of his head cropped off at the end of that row.

Of that group Skip is the only one I know of who became a full-fledged and board-certified engineer. He made it through Auburn’s difficult curriculum when that school was still rated one of the top engineering institutions in the country. He had the “right stuff.” Ronnie Hendrix, a neighbor from Darwin Downs and a fellow band member, joined us at Auburn in 1965, I believe, and was studying electrical engineering, but I lost track of what happened to him. He was a sharp fellow, so he probably finished. I didn’t know Edsel at all and have no idea of where his life has taken him. All I know about Bobby is that he lives in Huntsville. Tommy’s fate is an utter mystery to me.

My first and second quarter’s grades at Auburn indicated pretty quickly that I probably wasn’t suited to be any kind of an engineer. However, I slogged through various levels of the math, chemistry, and engineering drawing courses for a few more quarters to see if I would succumb to the romance of engineering after all (and to show my father that I was giving it a shot). I have to confess, though, that I was cheating with courses in the liberal arts during this time. Soon my secret love was no secret anymore. I found my thrill in the written word and became an English major. (See Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”) I’ve been a happy traveler on that path as a teacher and librarian.

The photo of the entire JETS corps in the ’64 Silver Sabre reveals the presence of two young ladies: Gudrun Wagner and Alice Ann Brigman. Gudrun didn’t follow in the engineering footsteps of her father, but she did teach math at Lee for two years after she graduated from UAH. Maybe she helped launch some scientific careers with that contribution. From there she went on to a career of 30-plus years in the information technology departments of Southern Railway and Norfolk Southern Corporation in Atlanta. After Lee High Alice Ann went to Auburn, I think; I don’t know whether she became an engineer. The very short conversation we had at the Big Reunion in 2005 didn’t touch on that subject.

The Lee JETS in 1965 must have been a fun group. Female membership swelled to six.

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