The Quonset Hut

Defying Gravity wrote:Apparently during that long summer and into the fall of 1961 Dad worked for the " Boys" from Meadville" without being paid. Once they knew that Dad had moved his family up to join him they withheld Dads consulting fee check ( which at 2500.00 a month in the early sixties was a substantial amount>) They eventually told Dad that they would pay him what they owed him.... it was thousands by Thanksgiving....IF he would just agree to work with Dr. Wang. Dad continued to refuse.... as the weather turned cold he started to cough again.... and Mother packed his bags.... before Christmas he left for Florida.... and when he came back he simply said that we were leaving... to pack.... I wasn't even to say good bye to my classmates....(and of course the most difficult thing for me was selling my horses)... but Dad said... this time ... I couldn't take them with me....that we were going to Nassau, Bahamas....we were to leave in three days.... and thats precisely what we did.....

http://ufodigest.com/article/dr-henry-kissingers-key-ufo-role-revealed wrote:In a free on-line publication on the scribd website titled, “Secret History: And Why Barack Obama Must End It,” Brunt follows a UFO witness trail to the wife of the late USAF scientist, Dr Eric Wang, who worked on reverse-engineering of captured or crashed discs at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico, prior to his death in 1960. His widow, Maria Wang, confirmed in 1984 that her husband had reported to Kissinger when Kissinger was still a relatively unknown academic and consultant to various intelligence and military programmes.

Pamela Druhan wrote:Re: Looking at Meadville through different eyes
Postby Pamela Druhan » Sun Mar 22, 2015 7:29 pm

So happy to join the forum and fill in some of the blanks in my own jigsaw puzzle of a life and maybe unearth some information for Linda too. I'm going to cut and paste a few things in the email exchanges with Linda to fill in background. But first...how I got this started in the first place. Two weeks ago I was staying with a friend who had some rotator cuff surgery. She didn't have local family so I played nursemaid for a couple of days. Since she was fairly incapacitated, we did a lot of sitting around and chatting about our respective lives. Linda and her father played a pretty significant role in my life...though only for a year so that story was one that I told her. She asked me if I had ever Googled Townsend Brown. I hadn't. I had seen something brief about him on a PBS show in the 90's and actually did an internet search then but found nothing. So, when I put in Townsend Brown and found not only several websites, videos and papers about him I was thrilled. When I found a reference to Linda and a link to contact her privately on the ttownsendbrown.com site, I did so immediately. At that point I had not read much on the site and was most interested in the ability to contact her. So...when she heard from me through that channel, (I now know) she was obviously suspicious. I wrote:

Hi Linda,

I don't know if you will remember a horse-crazy little girl that you gave
riding lessons to in Meadville, Pennsylvania. My name was Pam Brick and my
father, John Brick worked with your dad as part of Whitehall-Rand to try to
generate commercial interest from large corporations in both the air
purifier and the pump that worked on the principles of
electrohydrodynamics. Their construction was purported to be so simple
that your dad even tried to get me to build one for my 5th grade science
fair at school. I was too young to understand either the science or
business of it all and only know that my Dad put all of his life savings
and those of his mother into that company...and then lost it all. It was
the first of three times that he did something like that because he was
sure he had just met the smartest man in the world. With your dad, it may
have been true, and I am fascinated with the book Defying Gravity, about
his life. Like you, I moved constantly and lived in 27 places. Unlike
you, I didn't pursue the sciences and instead ended up working with
computers. I am now retired and living in Madison, Wisconsin.

My memories are more about the horses...Beauty, Bonfire, and a small Welch
pony whose name I don't remember. That summer..I think it was 1962 (?) was
magical for me as you patiently taught me how to ride bareback and in an
English saddle. I am now reading the book Defying Gravity and have not yet
found any references to that time.

Thank you for that magical year and for your kindness and for sharing your
beautiful horses,

Warm regards,

Pam (Brick) Druhan


In my next post, I'll start from the beginning and just provide what I remember from my time there. I haven't heard for Monarch before today but my own supposition as to the clarity of my memory versus Linda's being a blank has more to do with just how important those events were in our perspective lives. I was an 11-year-old fifth-grade horse-crazy girl with a relatively uneventful life being given private lessons by a gorgeous and stylish 16-year-old. I actually thought she was my best friend. I realize now that my parents probably paid for lessons. I was allowed to ride her beautiful horse Beauty as she taught me to ride bareback and English, and to jump. She assigned me readings and taught me everything about horses and I was totally smitten. She, on the other hand, was a 16-year-old who gave lessons during that time to lots of kids. I just learned from my sister that she was part of one of the group lessons. So Linda's life was already full of mystery and intrigue and riding lessons were something she did regularly. So it's likely that to her I was just another student whose name and face blurred in with all of the others

I'm currently reading Defying Gravity and loving it. I find it exciting that I and my family were a part (albeit small) of all of this...even if we didn't have a clue at the time.

Pamela Druhan wrote:Re: Looking at Meadville through different eyes
Postby Pamela Druhan » Mon Mar 23, 2015 4:14 pm

Here is my Meadville timeline as I remember it. I haven't answered a lot of questions that have been posed but will get to those too.

Meadville – My timeline as I remember it

Our family moved to Meadville in 1960. We initially lived on Sherman Street and I attended First District School in fourth grade. We rented that house and it was owned by Dr. Harry Winslow. He sold that house to Allegheny and it was originally a fraternity house, but has since been torn down…but there is a college building there. I have a picture of that house. We moved from there to Meadow Street and I lived there during both fifth and sixth grade. I can easily differentiate between things that happened in fourth grade and those that happened in fifth or sixth because my starting point for memories has always been to visualize where I lived. The exact order of things that happened during fifth and sixth grades are not as clear.

When we moved to Meadville, I am not sure what my father was doing for a job…but I think he was with a stock brokerage firm. When we were on Meadow Street, I first heard my father speaking about a new venture that he was getting involved with that centered around “the smartest man he had ever met”, Townsend Brown. He explained that Townsend Brown had invented an air purifier/fan that worked with no moving parts and a pump with no moving parts. Both devices worked on the principle of electrohydrodynamics and it had to do with the changing of ions. That is what I remember from the time…not from what I have read since.

I first met Dr Brown at our house on Meadow Street. He was at a dinner party that my parents had there. Josephine was not with him. My father was (again) explaining this to me with Dr Brown there and he said that the problem was that it was just “so damn simple that people couldn’t understand it”. He said if people had waited for everyone to understand the light bulb, we’d still be using candles and kerosene lamps. He said that I should build one for my science fair at school…that’s how simple it was. He got Dr Brown to draw a picture. My father drank quite a bit at social functions and I remember feeling that he had too much that evening. I remember Dr Brown being very gracious and soft spoken and going along with my father’s prodding.

My father definitely wasn’t one of the guys in the black Lincolns with portable phones. I don’t believe he would have been hired by any intelligence agency because he was a loose cannon when he drank. I do know that at this time he was working for Whitehall-Rand. He drove a grey Chrysler and my mother drove a beat-up white Chevy station wagon. I suspect from conversations in my house that my father was hired to sell this idea to big companies who could use them. He talked specifically about mining companies for the fan/air purifier and DuPont and other chemical companies for the pumps. He said that with no moving parts, there would be no failures and no maintenance. As I write more, keep in mind this is a very old memory from the perspective of a 10 year-old child.
He may have also been working to get investors but I don’t know that for sure. He definitely thought that this technology (or what he understood of it) was groundbreaking. He did invest everything he had, our college funds from our grandfather, and all of his mother’s money into Whitehall Rand. He was only 35 at the time. When I cleaned out his condo in Florida when he died, I came across the stock certificates he still had.

I remembered a bunch of names of people who were at our house during that time that were doctors. At the time I thought they were medical doctors, but thought I should look them up in case they were scientists and I just didn’t realize it. As it turns out, they were all medical doctors and were probably just golfing buddies of my dad. The only name that is at all familiar to me in what I have read so far in Defying Gravity is “Decker”. Of course that is a common name so it may mean nothing. He is mentioned to be working with Dr Brown much later…1966 I think. I know my Dad had moved on by then and was no longer involved. So, maybe Decker was involved more than once or maybe my recollection of someone named Decker means nothing at all.

I must have met Linda for the first time in the summer of 1961. I would have said that it was spring of 1962 but by that time she had moved so it must have been 1961. I met her at her house which was outside of town. My dad brought me with him while he was meeting with Dr Brown. I’m calculating from Linda’s movements that my interactions with her were summer through fall of 1961. I took riding lessons from her…but really more than that. There was “classroom” involved that happened in her house. I learned all of the parts of a horse, all of the proper equestrian terminology, how to brush a horse, clean its hooves, cool him down after a ride, and general care and feeding. I learned about the differences in breeds… and still remember what I learned about the characteristics of Morgan horses, Arabians, Thoroughbreds, Clydesdales and Welsh and Shetland ponies. She taught me how to properly sit an English saddle, post, ride bareback, and jump. She assigned books to read such as Justin Morgan Had a Horse and King of the Wind and I devoured them. I still hear her saying “Walk ON, Trrrr –ot, and CanTER. Sometime during that period, I went to a horse show with her. I was her sidekick and helped with the grooming. As short as it was, I remember that time as one of the best in my life. I don’t have any pictures of me riding but I do have a picture from that time that may have been taken at Linda’s house outside…but I’m truly guessing on that one based on the way I was dressed and my age.

I only recently found out that my younger sister, Sue, also took lessons from her in a group class. I became a life-long horse lover but never had one. My youngest sister was the only one to finally get a horse, but that was after I was in college. She has had horses ever since. I still go to the horse shows at the county fair.

Sometime in late Fall or early Winter, I began to hear discussions between my parents that things weren’t going well at Whitehall-Rand. This is the context where I may have heard the name “Decker”. Also, Dad was talking about the flying saucer that Townsend was working on. While he was awed by the possibilities it presented, it was getting in the way of selling corporations on the idea of the pump and fan/air purifier. I remember him saying to my mom that purchasing people were a conservative lot and didn’t understand science and they weren’t about to buy the pumps or fans that they already didn’t understand when they heard it was the same technology being used to build flying saucers. I remember him saying that he wished Townsend could just put that aside for a while. This leads me to believe that my father really didn’t know anything about the big picture of Townsend Brown.
Just before Christmas that year my mother and father were out for the evening and she broke her leg and was hospitalized and in traction. We kids were “farmed out” to friends while she was there. We weren’t allowed to visit her…I don’t know why. We did actually spend Christmas at home with our Dad but then went back to where we were staying.

When Mom came home from the hospital and we were together again, I learned that Whitehall Rand was no more. The next thing I knew my dad was working for a company that had something to do with cryogenics. That also lasted less than a year and we moved to Oil City, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1963 where he worked again as a stockbroker. He had lost everything of both his own savings and his mother’s. She came to live with us in Oil City.

More later….

From the post above wrote: I remember him saying to my mom that purchasing people were a conservative lot and didn’t understand science and they weren’t about to buy the pumps or fans that they already didn’t understand when they heard it was the same technology being used to build flying saucers. I remember him saying that he wished Townsend could just put that aside for a while. This leads me to believe that my father really didn’t know anything about the big picture of Townsend Brown.