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Fran Underwood

Other Talents & Hobbies

e-mail from Mitch Marcus - elmit atsign att dot net - to Robert Garner - September 05, 2009

Subject: FW: Re: Fw: Emailing: Fran's Watercolor of Ferrari Hi Robert, Fran sent me a copy of his watercolor. I knew about a lot of his talents but I never knew he had painted. I asked him jokingly what other talents he had been hiding and he sent me this email which I'm forwarding to you, as is. BTW, I'm looking forward to your probability problem. Mitch

e-mail from Fran Underwood to Mitch Marcus, 31 Aug 2009

Mitch: Other talents? Throughout my most of my career, I maintained contact with various Tool and Die shops in the area and designed tools and dies, Moonlighting. Also designed a line of Industrial Wood working machines; gang saws, drilling machines, sanders, etc. Also designed advertising and product brochures. For hobbies, I did a lot of cabinet-making, model-making and miniature furniture and doll houses. Also made copies of antique furniture. Also, had a private pilot's license and did a lot of flying. Was part-owner of a WW11 Stearman trainer ( biplane, two open cockpits) and did a lot of aerobatics. Also, built an experimental plane, welded steel tube fuselage, wooden wings. Had to sell it before completion because I was transferred to Minnesota. After IBM, I was self employed as a consulting engineer for about 10 years. During that time I designed a cylindrical grinding machine, accurate to 10 micro-inches, a Jaws-of-life device and 15 scrap-metal recovery plants for USA and Scotland. Also, designed a couple of floppy-disk drive testers using the Intel 8085 CPU and wrote about a half-million lines of code in assembly language. Then, at age 62, I got a job designing Ski lifts for fifteen years. Wonderful job. That's about it! Fran