AERONAUTICAL ENGINEER
INVENTOR; U.S. PATENTS
__________________________________
A TRIBUTE FROM A COLLEAGUE AND FRIEND
Mike was my friend, mentor, and colleague for over thirty years. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I made my livelihood during that entire time by cashing in on his creativity – He was the design genius; I’m the salesman.
I met Mike when I interviewed for a job at Western Design in the summer of ’83 – the company that he and his partners founded a couple of years earlier. He had hydraulic oil on his hands from assembling a prototype automatic loader for an experimental version of the Abrams tank. He didn’t just design the machines – he involved himself in the assembly and testing so he knew that it was being done right. Some people turn up their noses when you say “defense contractor” – that phrase sometimes has negative connotations to some of the unwashed masses. Somebody’s got to do it – why not the best? Mike made a difference in the way weapons work that has left an indelible mark for all those that follow.
The Chinese invented gunpowder a long time ago, and in the intervening centuries the bullet and gun evolved a long way. When Maxim came up with the machine gun, the bullets had to go into a canvas belt so they could be fed into the machine that gobbled them up at an unprecedented rate. The canvas belt gave way to metal links, but the problem of gun stoppages never went away. There were dozens of ways things could go wrong with that system – none of them happy circumstances when you’re in the middle of a fight.
Mike changed all that with a patent called “Linear Linkless.”
Most engineers think in three dimensions – x, y, and z. But Mike thought in four dimensions – he added t for time. He developed and taught the “youngsters” some math that defined continuity of motion and applied those principles to the high-speed transportation of stuff. It could have been FedEx boxes or packages of Hostess Twinkies, but in our case it was ammunition – bullets small and large. He started building his reputation back in his Ford Aeronutronics days with incredible designs for an experimental 25mm caseless telescoped gun system for the F-15 called the GAU-7. Forty years later folks are still trying to make that caseless technology work. And when they do, the bullets will be moved at fantastic speeds by a system just like the one Mike designed. He was way out in front of the curve.
One of the early systems Mike designed at his new company, Western Design, was a savior for the brand new Apache Attack helicopter – we all are familiar with that famous aircraft. Hughes Helicopters in Culver City had won the development contract for the bird in the late 1970’s. Hughes also had an ordnance group that designed the famous Chain Gun that pivots under its nose and aims where the pilot turns his head. But they screwed up on how to store the bullets and feed the gun.
Mike proposed a solution that won us our first big contract and came up with a prototype called the “6-PAK” (guess where that name came from) in four months and thirteen days. It worked perfectly, and the helicopter’s gun system was saved. That prototype morphed into a 12-PAK to fulfill the Army’s capacity requirement and became the first fielded multi-bay ammo handling system in the world. Many years later, a British customer used the words “elegant simplicity” after seeing one of Mike’s creations work. It’s basically bicycle chain and gears – unbelievably reliable and rugged. This thing took two streams of bullets moving and high speed and merged them into one stream for the gun like a Las Vegas card dealer on crack cocaine and steroids. Our demonstrations still amaze visitors today.
The Army’s spec required that the feed system for the Apache would go for a preposterous 50,000 rounds between failure. Seven years later in the 80’s in the middle of our production run, they quit keeping data on its performance because it never failed.
Thirty-five years later, the Army still doesn’t know what the reliability of that machine is. Elegant simplicity. It keeps the drama down-range. We’re still building Mike’s 12-PAK today. We fix the old ones with bullet holes in them, with tree branches stuck in there, with fork lift truck tine holes in them – but we very rarely get one back that just wore out or broke. There are over 1,400 hundred of those aircraft all over the world operated by the US Army, the Brits, the Dutch, the Japanese, the Greeks, the Israelis, the Indians, Saudi Arabia, the Egyptians, the Taiwanese, to name a few. And Mike’s patented system is in every one of them.
Later, Mike came up with a way to merge three streams of ammo into one. When we first turned it on, we had a clear Plexiglas cover made so we could watch the innards work at low speed and high. It was a freaking marvel! Today on all of the Navy’s aircraft carriers, Mike’s design loads all the 20mmk ammo into the Navy’s fighter jets. A system similar to this is also now being installed on all the Marine Corps’ Cobra Attack helicopters. A Marine Corps General wrote me to say that our new Cobra gear improved the gun system’s reliability by 830%!
We were contracted by General Dynamics several years ago in another emergency/crisis situation to come up with a new design for part of an automatic loading system for the big 105mm tank gun on the Army’s Stryker vehicle. One of the challenges was to move this hulking 50-lb tank round four feet forward in about one second. After locking himself in his office for a couple of days, he emerged with something that he called “zipper chain.” It was a weird clunky-looking “chain” with all sorts of sharp corners and pins and rollers that could be wrapped up like a rope in all directions, but when you ran the “chain” through zipper, it turned into a stiff rod. It quickly got renamed “Viagra Chain” – obviously. His system never failed once during combat in Iraq.
Mike had lots of patents – and we shamelessly made our living off of those inventions. Things called “twisters,” “mergers,” “accelerators,” “accumulators,” “chain ladder,” and, of course “zipper chain.” He’d get cranky in the middle of his creative process, but in the end, he always came out with the winning solution. And it was always simple and reliable. From autoloading robots in tanks to lightweight high-speed systems on helicopters and the big “Spooky” gunship that the troops love to have circling overhead, they’re all Mike’s creativity – like works of modern industrial art.
And Mike could write. I don’t think he ever really learned how to type, but he could write a technical proposal – a real rarity amongst engineers who are simply apoplectic when trying to reduce complex theory into readable prose. For the past thirty-odd years, I’ve been the Grammar Nazi of Western Design and all of its reincarnations. From Mike I would get thirty or forty pages of hand-written stuff on yellow quad-ruled tablet paper that would have to be transposed into a formal write-up. And as the Grammar Nazi, I am ruthless in my editing, red lines on everything – but not with Mike’s stuff. I learned very early on to take his stuff word-for-word. If I changed so much as a comma or an apostrophe, he’d catch it and come argue with me that his way was the right way – and he almost always won. He could take ‘virgin’ reader and carry him through the entire complex system in a clear, concise, organized manner that is truly rare and constantly astounded me. Even I could understand what was going on in the machine! I have missed that since he retired.
I truly appreciate Jill having given me the opportunity to pay a small tribute to my old friend at this farewell celebration. I hope I haven’t bored you, but I thought it was appropriate and important to let all of you know what an amazing creative mind that many of us had the pleasure and honor to work with over the years. He had an impact. He made a difference – and not many of us can make that claim. There are famous names in gun stuff from history. Names like Maxim, Gatling, Browning, Stoner, and Kalashnikov. Golden is now one of them.
* This is a tribute presented by a colleague of Mike's at his memorial service. Courtesy: Jill Golden.
INVENTOR; U.S. PATENTS
__________________________________
A TRIBUTE FROM A COLLEAGUE AND FRIEND
Mike was my friend, mentor, and colleague for over thirty years. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I made my livelihood during that entire time by cashing in on his creativity – He was the design genius; I’m the salesman.
I met Mike when I interviewed for a job at Western Design in the summer of ’83 – the company that he and his partners founded a couple of years earlier. He had hydraulic oil on his hands from assembling a prototype automatic loader for an experimental version of the Abrams tank. He didn’t just design the machines – he involved himself in the assembly and testing so he knew that it was being done right. Some people turn up their noses when you say “defense contractor” – that phrase sometimes has negative connotations to some of the unwashed masses. Somebody’s got to do it – why not the best? Mike made a difference in the way weapons work that has left an indelible mark for all those that follow.
The Chinese invented gunpowder a long time ago, and in the intervening centuries the bullet and gun evolved a long way. When Maxim came up with the machine gun, the bullets had to go into a canvas belt so they could be fed into the machine that gobbled them up at an unprecedented rate. The canvas belt gave way to metal links, but the problem of gun stoppages never went away. There were dozens of ways things could go wrong with that system – none of them happy circumstances when you’re in the middle of a fight.
Mike changed all that with a patent called “Linear Linkless.”
Most engineers think in three dimensions – x, y, and z. But Mike thought in four dimensions – he added t for time. He developed and taught the “youngsters” some math that defined continuity of motion and applied those principles to the high-speed transportation of stuff. It could have been FedEx boxes or packages of Hostess Twinkies, but in our case it was ammunition – bullets small and large. He started building his reputation back in his Ford Aeronutronics days with incredible designs for an experimental 25mm caseless telescoped gun system for the F-15 called the GAU-7. Forty years later folks are still trying to make that caseless technology work. And when they do, the bullets will be moved at fantastic speeds by a system just like the one Mike designed. He was way out in front of the curve.
One of the early systems Mike designed at his new company, Western Design, was a savior for the brand new Apache Attack helicopter – we all are familiar with that famous aircraft. Hughes Helicopters in Culver City had won the development contract for the bird in the late 1970’s. Hughes also had an ordnance group that designed the famous Chain Gun that pivots under its nose and aims where the pilot turns his head. But they screwed up on how to store the bullets and feed the gun.
Mike proposed a solution that won us our first big contract and came up with a prototype called the “6-PAK” (guess where that name came from) in four months and thirteen days. It worked perfectly, and the helicopter’s gun system was saved. That prototype morphed into a 12-PAK to fulfill the Army’s capacity requirement and became the first fielded multi-bay ammo handling system in the world. Many years later, a British customer used the words “elegant simplicity” after seeing one of Mike’s creations work. It’s basically bicycle chain and gears – unbelievably reliable and rugged. This thing took two streams of bullets moving and high speed and merged them into one stream for the gun like a Las Vegas card dealer on crack cocaine and steroids. Our demonstrations still amaze visitors today.
The Army’s spec required that the feed system for the Apache would go for a preposterous 50,000 rounds between failure. Seven years later in the 80’s in the middle of our production run, they quit keeping data on its performance because it never failed.
Thirty-five years later, the Army still doesn’t know what the reliability of that machine is. Elegant simplicity. It keeps the drama down-range. We’re still building Mike’s 12-PAK today. We fix the old ones with bullet holes in them, with tree branches stuck in there, with fork lift truck tine holes in them – but we very rarely get one back that just wore out or broke. There are over 1,400 hundred of those aircraft all over the world operated by the US Army, the Brits, the Dutch, the Japanese, the Greeks, the Israelis, the Indians, Saudi Arabia, the Egyptians, the Taiwanese, to name a few. And Mike’s patented system is in every one of them.
Later, Mike came up with a way to merge three streams of ammo into one. When we first turned it on, we had a clear Plexiglas cover made so we could watch the innards work at low speed and high. It was a freaking marvel! Today on all of the Navy’s aircraft carriers, Mike’s design loads all the 20mmk ammo into the Navy’s fighter jets. A system similar to this is also now being installed on all the Marine Corps’ Cobra Attack helicopters. A Marine Corps General wrote me to say that our new Cobra gear improved the gun system’s reliability by 830%!
We were contracted by General Dynamics several years ago in another emergency/crisis situation to come up with a new design for part of an automatic loading system for the big 105mm tank gun on the Army’s Stryker vehicle. One of the challenges was to move this hulking 50-lb tank round four feet forward in about one second. After locking himself in his office for a couple of days, he emerged with something that he called “zipper chain.” It was a weird clunky-looking “chain” with all sorts of sharp corners and pins and rollers that could be wrapped up like a rope in all directions, but when you ran the “chain” through zipper, it turned into a stiff rod. It quickly got renamed “Viagra Chain” – obviously. His system never failed once during combat in Iraq.
Mike had lots of patents – and we shamelessly made our living off of those inventions. Things called “twisters,” “mergers,” “accelerators,” “accumulators,” “chain ladder,” and, of course “zipper chain.” He’d get cranky in the middle of his creative process, but in the end, he always came out with the winning solution. And it was always simple and reliable. From autoloading robots in tanks to lightweight high-speed systems on helicopters and the big “Spooky” gunship that the troops love to have circling overhead, they’re all Mike’s creativity – like works of modern industrial art.
And Mike could write. I don’t think he ever really learned how to type, but he could write a technical proposal – a real rarity amongst engineers who are simply apoplectic when trying to reduce complex theory into readable prose. For the past thirty-odd years, I’ve been the Grammar Nazi of Western Design and all of its reincarnations. From Mike I would get thirty or forty pages of hand-written stuff on yellow quad-ruled tablet paper that would have to be transposed into a formal write-up. And as the Grammar Nazi, I am ruthless in my editing, red lines on everything – but not with Mike’s stuff. I learned very early on to take his stuff word-for-word. If I changed so much as a comma or an apostrophe, he’d catch it and come argue with me that his way was the right way – and he almost always won. He could take ‘virgin’ reader and carry him through the entire complex system in a clear, concise, organized manner that is truly rare and constantly astounded me. Even I could understand what was going on in the machine! I have missed that since he retired.
I truly appreciate Jill having given me the opportunity to pay a small tribute to my old friend at this farewell celebration. I hope I haven’t bored you, but I thought it was appropriate and important to let all of you know what an amazing creative mind that many of us had the pleasure and honor to work with over the years. He had an impact. He made a difference – and not many of us can make that claim. There are famous names in gun stuff from history. Names like Maxim, Gatling, Browning, Stoner, and Kalashnikov. Golden is now one of them.
* This is a tribute presented by a colleague of Mike's at his memorial service. Courtesy: Jill Golden.
AERONAUTICAL ENGINEER
INVENTOR; U.S. PATENTS
__________________________________
A TRIBUTE FROM A COLLEAGUE AND FRIEND
Mike was my friend, mentor, and colleague for over thirty years. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I made my livelihood during that entire time by cashing in on his creativity – He was the design genius; I’m the salesman.
I met Mike when I interviewed for a job at Western Design in the summer of ’83 – the company that he and his partners founded a couple of years earlier. He had hydraulic oil on his hands from assembling a prototype automatic loader for an experimental version of the Abrams tank. He didn’t just design the machines – he involved himself in the assembly and testing so he knew that it was being done right. Some people turn up their noses when you say “defense contractor” – that phrase sometimes has negative connotations to some of the unwashed masses. Somebody’s got to do it – why not the best? Mike made a difference in the way weapons work that has left an indelible mark for all those that follow.
The Chinese invented gunpowder a long time ago, and in the intervening centuries the bullet and gun evolved a long way. When Maxim came up with the machine gun, the bullets had to go into a canvas belt so they could be fed into the machine that gobbled them up at an unprecedented rate. The canvas belt gave way to metal links, but the problem of gun stoppages never went away. There were dozens of ways things could go wrong with that system – none of them happy circumstances when you’re in the middle of a fight.
Mike changed all that with a patent called “Linear Linkless.”
Most engineers think in three dimensions – x, y, and z. But Mike thought in four dimensions – he added t for time. He developed and taught the “youngsters” some math that defined continuity of motion and applied those principles to the high-speed transportation of stuff. It could have been FedEx boxes or packages of Hostess Twinkies, but in our case it was ammunition – bullets small and large. He started building his reputation back in his Ford Aeronutronics days with incredible designs for an experimental 25mm caseless telescoped gun system for the F-15 called the GAU-7. Forty years later folks are still trying to make that caseless technology work. And when they do, the bullets will be moved at fantastic speeds by a system just like the one Mike designed. He was way out in front of the curve.
One of the early systems Mike designed at his new company, Western Design, was a savior for the brand new Apache Attack helicopter – we all are familiar with that famous aircraft. Hughes Helicopters in Culver City had won the development contract for the bird in the late 1970’s. Hughes also had an ordnance group that designed the famous Chain Gun that pivots under its nose and aims where the pilot turns his head. But they screwed up on how to store the bullets and feed the gun.
Mike proposed a solution that won us our first big contract and came up with a prototype called the “6-PAK” (guess where that name came from) in four months and thirteen days. It worked perfectly, and the helicopter’s gun system was saved. That prototype morphed into a 12-PAK to fulfill the Army’s capacity requirement and became the first fielded multi-bay ammo handling system in the world. Many years later, a British customer used the words “elegant simplicity” after seeing one of Mike’s creations work. It’s basically bicycle chain and gears – unbelievably reliable and rugged. This thing took two streams of bullets moving and high speed and merged them into one stream for the gun like a Las Vegas card dealer on crack cocaine and steroids. Our demonstrations still amaze visitors today.
The Army’s spec required that the feed system for the Apache would go for a preposterous 50,000 rounds between failure. Seven years later in the 80’s in the middle of our production run, they quit keeping data on its performance because it never failed.
Thirty-five years later, the Army still doesn’t know what the reliability of that machine is. Elegant simplicity. It keeps the drama down-range. We’re still building Mike’s 12-PAK today. We fix the old ones with bullet holes in them, with tree branches stuck in there, with fork lift truck tine holes in them – but we very rarely get one back that just wore out or broke. There are over 1,400 hundred of those aircraft all over the world operated by the US Army, the Brits, the Dutch, the Japanese, the Greeks, the Israelis, the Indians, Saudi Arabia, the Egyptians, the Taiwanese, to name a few. And Mike’s patented system is in every one of them.
Later, Mike came up with a way to merge three streams of ammo into one. When we first turned it on, we had a clear Plexiglas cover made so we could watch the innards work at low speed and high. It was a freaking marvel! Today on all of the Navy’s aircraft carriers, Mike’s design loads all the 20mmk ammo into the Navy’s fighter jets. A system similar to this is also now being installed on all the Marine Corps’ Cobra Attack helicopters. A Marine Corps General wrote me to say that our new Cobra gear improved the gun system’s reliability by 830%!
We were contracted by General Dynamics several years ago in another emergency/crisis situation to come up with a new design for part of an automatic loading system for the big 105mm tank gun on the Army’s Stryker vehicle. One of the challenges was to move this hulking 50-lb tank round four feet forward in about one second. After locking himself in his office for a couple of days, he emerged with something that he called “zipper chain.” It was a weird clunky-looking “chain” with all sorts of sharp corners and pins and rollers that could be wrapped up like a rope in all directions, but when you ran the “chain” through zipper, it turned into a stiff rod. It quickly got renamed “Viagra Chain” – obviously. His system never failed once during combat in Iraq.
Mike had lots of patents – and we shamelessly made our living off of those inventions. Things called “twisters,” “mergers,” “accelerators,” “accumulators,” “chain ladder,” and, of course “zipper chain.” He’d get cranky in the middle of his creative process, but in the end, he always came out with the winning solution. And it was always simple and reliable. From autoloading robots in tanks to lightweight high-speed systems on helicopters and the big “Spooky” gunship that the troops love to have circling overhead, they’re all Mike’s creativity – like works of modern industrial art.
And Mike could write. I don’t think he ever really learned how to type, but he could write a technical proposal – a real rarity amongst engineers who are simply apoplectic when trying to reduce complex theory into readable prose. For the past thirty-odd years, I’ve been the Grammar Nazi of Western Design and all of its reincarnations. From Mike I would get thirty or forty pages of hand-written stuff on yellow quad-ruled tablet paper that would have to be transposed into a formal write-up. And as the Grammar Nazi, I am ruthless in my editing, red lines on everything – but not with Mike’s stuff. I learned very early on to take his stuff word-for-word. If I changed so much as a comma or an apostrophe, he’d catch it and come argue with me that his way was the right way – and he almost always won. He could take ‘virgin’ reader and carry him through the entire complex system in a clear, concise, organized manner that is truly rare and constantly astounded me. Even I could understand what was going on in the machine! I have missed that since he retired.
I truly appreciate Jill having given me the opportunity to pay a small tribute to my old friend at this farewell celebration. I hope I haven’t bored you, but I thought it was appropriate and important to let all of you know what an amazing creative mind that many of us had the pleasure and honor to work with over the years. He had an impact. He made a difference – and not many of us can make that claim. There are famous names in gun stuff from history. Names like Maxim, Gatling, Browning, Stoner, and Kalashnikov. Golden is now one of them.
* This is a tribute presented by a colleague of Mike's at his memorial service. Courtesy: Jill Golden.
INVENTOR; U.S. PATENTS
__________________________________
A TRIBUTE FROM A COLLEAGUE AND FRIEND
Mike was my friend, mentor, and colleague for over thirty years. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I made my livelihood during that entire time by cashing in on his creativity – He was the design genius; I’m the salesman.
I met Mike when I interviewed for a job at Western Design in the summer of ’83 – the company that he and his partners founded a couple of years earlier. He had hydraulic oil on his hands from assembling a prototype automatic loader for an experimental version of the Abrams tank. He didn’t just design the machines – he involved himself in the assembly and testing so he knew that it was being done right. Some people turn up their noses when you say “defense contractor” – that phrase sometimes has negative connotations to some of the unwashed masses. Somebody’s got to do it – why not the best? Mike made a difference in the way weapons work that has left an indelible mark for all those that follow.
The Chinese invented gunpowder a long time ago, and in the intervening centuries the bullet and gun evolved a long way. When Maxim came up with the machine gun, the bullets had to go into a canvas belt so they could be fed into the machine that gobbled them up at an unprecedented rate. The canvas belt gave way to metal links, but the problem of gun stoppages never went away. There were dozens of ways things could go wrong with that system – none of them happy circumstances when you’re in the middle of a fight.
Mike changed all that with a patent called “Linear Linkless.”
Most engineers think in three dimensions – x, y, and z. But Mike thought in four dimensions – he added t for time. He developed and taught the “youngsters” some math that defined continuity of motion and applied those principles to the high-speed transportation of stuff. It could have been FedEx boxes or packages of Hostess Twinkies, but in our case it was ammunition – bullets small and large. He started building his reputation back in his Ford Aeronutronics days with incredible designs for an experimental 25mm caseless telescoped gun system for the F-15 called the GAU-7. Forty years later folks are still trying to make that caseless technology work. And when they do, the bullets will be moved at fantastic speeds by a system just like the one Mike designed. He was way out in front of the curve.
One of the early systems Mike designed at his new company, Western Design, was a savior for the brand new Apache Attack helicopter – we all are familiar with that famous aircraft. Hughes Helicopters in Culver City had won the development contract for the bird in the late 1970’s. Hughes also had an ordnance group that designed the famous Chain Gun that pivots under its nose and aims where the pilot turns his head. But they screwed up on how to store the bullets and feed the gun.
Mike proposed a solution that won us our first big contract and came up with a prototype called the “6-PAK” (guess where that name came from) in four months and thirteen days. It worked perfectly, and the helicopter’s gun system was saved. That prototype morphed into a 12-PAK to fulfill the Army’s capacity requirement and became the first fielded multi-bay ammo handling system in the world. Many years later, a British customer used the words “elegant simplicity” after seeing one of Mike’s creations work. It’s basically bicycle chain and gears – unbelievably reliable and rugged. This thing took two streams of bullets moving and high speed and merged them into one stream for the gun like a Las Vegas card dealer on crack cocaine and steroids. Our demonstrations still amaze visitors today.
The Army’s spec required that the feed system for the Apache would go for a preposterous 50,000 rounds between failure. Seven years later in the 80’s in the middle of our production run, they quit keeping data on its performance because it never failed.
Thirty-five years later, the Army still doesn’t know what the reliability of that machine is. Elegant simplicity. It keeps the drama down-range. We’re still building Mike’s 12-PAK today. We fix the old ones with bullet holes in them, with tree branches stuck in there, with fork lift truck tine holes in them – but we very rarely get one back that just wore out or broke. There are over 1,400 hundred of those aircraft all over the world operated by the US Army, the Brits, the Dutch, the Japanese, the Greeks, the Israelis, the Indians, Saudi Arabia, the Egyptians, the Taiwanese, to name a few. And Mike’s patented system is in every one of them.
Later, Mike came up with a way to merge three streams of ammo into one. When we first turned it on, we had a clear Plexiglas cover made so we could watch the innards work at low speed and high. It was a freaking marvel! Today on all of the Navy’s aircraft carriers, Mike’s design loads all the 20mmk ammo into the Navy’s fighter jets. A system similar to this is also now being installed on all the Marine Corps’ Cobra Attack helicopters. A Marine Corps General wrote me to say that our new Cobra gear improved the gun system’s reliability by 830%!
We were contracted by General Dynamics several years ago in another emergency/crisis situation to come up with a new design for part of an automatic loading system for the big 105mm tank gun on the Army’s Stryker vehicle. One of the challenges was to move this hulking 50-lb tank round four feet forward in about one second. After locking himself in his office for a couple of days, he emerged with something that he called “zipper chain.” It was a weird clunky-looking “chain” with all sorts of sharp corners and pins and rollers that could be wrapped up like a rope in all directions, but when you ran the “chain” through zipper, it turned into a stiff rod. It quickly got renamed “Viagra Chain” – obviously. His system never failed once during combat in Iraq.
Mike had lots of patents – and we shamelessly made our living off of those inventions. Things called “twisters,” “mergers,” “accelerators,” “accumulators,” “chain ladder,” and, of course “zipper chain.” He’d get cranky in the middle of his creative process, but in the end, he always came out with the winning solution. And it was always simple and reliable. From autoloading robots in tanks to lightweight high-speed systems on helicopters and the big “Spooky” gunship that the troops love to have circling overhead, they’re all Mike’s creativity – like works of modern industrial art.
And Mike could write. I don’t think he ever really learned how to type, but he could write a technical proposal – a real rarity amongst engineers who are simply apoplectic when trying to reduce complex theory into readable prose. For the past thirty-odd years, I’ve been the Grammar Nazi of Western Design and all of its reincarnations. From Mike I would get thirty or forty pages of hand-written stuff on yellow quad-ruled tablet paper that would have to be transposed into a formal write-up. And as the Grammar Nazi, I am ruthless in my editing, red lines on everything – but not with Mike’s stuff. I learned very early on to take his stuff word-for-word. If I changed so much as a comma or an apostrophe, he’d catch it and come argue with me that his way was the right way – and he almost always won. He could take ‘virgin’ reader and carry him through the entire complex system in a clear, concise, organized manner that is truly rare and constantly astounded me. Even I could understand what was going on in the machine! I have missed that since he retired.
I truly appreciate Jill having given me the opportunity to pay a small tribute to my old friend at this farewell celebration. I hope I haven’t bored you, but I thought it was appropriate and important to let all of you know what an amazing creative mind that many of us had the pleasure and honor to work with over the years. He had an impact. He made a difference – and not many of us can make that claim. There are famous names in gun stuff from history. Names like Maxim, Gatling, Browning, Stoner, and Kalashnikov. Golden is now one of them.
* This is a tribute presented by a colleague of Mike's at his memorial service. Courtesy: Jill Golden.
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