Imagine you're a student at Fairmount College. The year
is 1917.
It’s a fine fall day, and you’re walking to class – to English lit taught by Flora Clough, say, or to economics or geology, chemistry, physics, gymnasium, maybe to Bible study or piano or expression, philosophy, art or to Marie Graham’s history class.
Whatever the course, your destination is Fairmount Hall atop Fairmount Hill. A mechanical droning catches your attention; the sound is coming from about a quarter-mile off to the north.
You pause, look to the sky and see a monoplane – you know its name is The Comet. It’s famous. Only months earlier, on July 5, Clyde Cessna used it to set a national airspeed record of 124.6 MPH and a national distance record of 76 miles flying from Blackwell, Okla., to Wichita. The Comet skims along just above the horizon line and disappears into the blue distance.
In the fall of the year Velma Lunt was born, 1917, Clyde and Roy Cessna, the uncles of her future husband Dwane Wallace ’33, moved their small Wichita aeroplane company from its location at the Jones Motor Car plant to a small field a quarter-mile north of today’s WSU campus. By November, Clyde had made several improvements to The Comet, including the installation of a new 70-horsepower Anzani engine. But the times were uncertain. World War I was in full, bloody swing. In late 1917, partially because of growing restrictions set by the U.S. War Industries Board on fuel allocations for civilian flying, the Cessnas shuttered their shop, and Clyde returned to his farm near Rago, Kan. He couldn’t stay grounded, though, and a decade later, in 1927, Cessna Aircraft was incorporated.
Two years later, Dwane Wallace – who as a 10-year-old had taken his first airplane ride with his uncle Clyde in an OX-5 Swallow, one of the first aircraft manufactured in Wichita – became the one to tangibly interweave Cessna Aircraft’s history with that of Wichita State University. Wallace (b. 1911, d. 1989) once recalled that he left his rural Kansas home when he was 17 years old “to seek my fortune. I cranked up the Model T Ford. A rod burned out at Cheney corner, which was about 15 miles from home, so I just stopped and fixed it. I knew the man at the gas station and asked if I could use their oil rack to fix it. I was on my way to Wichita University.”
Only a handful of public universities then offered a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering: the universities of Cincinnati, Detroit, Michigan, Minnesota, MIT – and the University of Wichita. “When Dwane arrived on campus in 1929, a tall and slender young man from Kingman, Kansas, he could never have envisioned the future that lay before him,” Velma (Lunt) Wallace told a WSU audience in 2002. “The tiny academic program in aeronautical engineering had just been formed and was in the business college because there was no engineering college.”
Frank Neff had been dean of WU’s School of Business Administration and Industry since 1926. “The words ‘and Industry’ were included so it could house the engineering courses,” explained Mel Snyder ’50 (d. 2012), WSU professor emeritus of aerospace engineering, during an interview in 2000. Alexander Petroff, a native of Russia and graduate of the University of Michigan, directed WU’s degree program in aeronautical engineering. Roy Elliott, another Michigan graduate and WU’s bursar and professor of engineering, and Charles Miller, assistant professor of engineering, completed the roster of engineering faculty.
One of Petroff’s first major tasks, Snyder said, was the construction of a wind tunnel. He designed a 4-ft, open-return tunnel made of wood that was installed in the unfinished attic of the newly built Science Hall, later renamed McKinley Hall. For his senior project, Wallace used the wind tunnel to design and test the first model of what he redesigned in 1934 into the C-34, a classic monoplane later famously known as the Cessna Airmaster.
As new and green as it was, WU’s aeronautical engineering program attracted some top-flight personalities; one was Edmund Allen, a World War I instructor pilot who later did test flying for nearly every major aircraft manufacturer. “I first met Eddie Allen, the test pilot, about 1930,” Wallace once recalled. “He was in Wichita doing spin tests on the Northr0p Beta, and during his two or three months in Wichita, he would come out in the evening and visit with the aeronautical engineering students in our classroom.”
Despite its success, once the Depression took hold and enrollment fell, WU administrators canceled the aeronautical engineering degree program in 1930. Students already enrolled were able to complete their degrees, but no new students were accepted. The program wasn’t the only aeronautical-related casualty of the Depression, of course. Cessna Aircraft itself closed in 1932, and Clyde went back to his Rago farm.
After graduating, Wallace went to work at Beech Aircraft as an engineer. The job was short-lived. By early 1934, Wallace and his brother, Dwight, a lawyer, had convinced Clyde to leave his farm and be installed as president of a re-launched Cessna Aircraft Co., with 22-year-old Wallace as general manager. In 1936, in the depths of the Depression, the Wallace brothers bought out their uncle’s interests, and Clyde retired, once and for all, to his farm. Dwight became secretary-treasurer, and Dwane, president, a position he would hold until 1975 and use to nurture Cessna into a world renowned manufacturer of general aviation aircraft and one of the nation’s top 500 corporations.
In 1937, Velma Lunt was hired as secretary to the president. She was the only woman at the company then, and the men weren’t above teasing her with impossible tasks. “They sent me out to find prop wash,” she explained once. “Prop wash is the wind from the propeller!” In 1941, she became Mrs. Dwane Wallace. In due time, the couple had four daughters – Linda Lee, Karen Kay, Diana Dee and Sarah Sue.
In 2009, the second year of the global recession, Velma Wallace spoke to a group of WSU engineering students uncertain about the future. “I hope,” she told them, “that in these circumstances you take heart in understanding that the very nature of an engineering education equips you for uncertainty. The uncertain road often yields results that could never have been expected, to opportunities one could never image. Let me offer you a brief example from my own life. There were no college funds for me. In fact, women were not encouraged to go to college except for specific fields and careers. I felt lucky to gain some training that enabled me to get a job with Cessna Aircraft. Never did a company start under less favorable circumstances.”
In 1957, Oliver Elliott ’42, president of the WU Alumni Association, wrote a letter to Dwane Wallace to tell him of his selection as the recipient of the 1957 Achievement Award. One announcement of the honor notes, “Today, Wallace heads a company which produces more than a third of all such aircraft sold in the free world.” Dwane and Velma attended the gala award presentation, held in conjunction with the association’s spring alumni reunion festivities.
An active alumnus, Dwane was instrumental in founding, in 1965, the WSU Endowment Association; he served as its first chairman. The Wallaces and Cessna Aircraft also made the key contribution for the modernization of Cessna Stadium. And in May 1976, WSU’s noted Wallace Scholars program was born through the establishment of the Dwane L. and Velma Lunt Wallace Fund. The endowment fund was set up to support scholarships and graduate fellowships for engineering students, as well as to purchase equipment and meet other needs of the WSU College of Engineering.
The college, which traces its origins back to that early aeronautical engineering program (1928-33), was formed in 1965. Other milestone years in its early history: 1946, the Engineering Department was added to the College of Business Administration and Industry; 1949, the School of Engineering was created with two degree-granting and three non-degree departments; 1960, a revision of the engineering curriculum was undertaken and accreditation of all programs was begun.
On April 22, 1977, the CoE’s new building, Wallace Hall, was dedicated. The day began with an engineering seminar. That afternoon, Dwane, who, although retired as CEO, was senior consultant and member of Cessna’s board and executive committee, addressed the audience; Velma presided over the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Velma Ruth Lunt grew up on her parents’ dairy farm in what is now northwest Wichita to become one of general aviation’s earliest woman pilots. She “walked with captains of industry, dined with celebrities and astronauts, received honors and accolades – even met two of our nation’s presidents,” as her daughter Karen put it in a Plaza of Heroines tribute. In 2008, Velma addressed a group of Wallace Scholars, saying “The creation and development of the Wallace Scholars program has been a highlight in my very eventful life. Really, I had no idea at the beginning that this would become such a wonderful thing. Each year, I see the Wallace Scholars go into the world of work, and I feel a part of me goes with them. I know my husband would be as proud of this as I am.”
Paul Lytle ’81/06 was among the first group of Wallace scholarship recipients. A mechanical engineering graduate, he also holds a master’s degree in engineering management and is a building systems engineer at WSU. Another Wallace Scholar who works at the university is Samantha (Vitt) Corcoran ’01/04, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in industrial engineering. She is assistant dean at the CoE and adviser to current Wallace Scholars.
“If any single program could be said to be the heart of an entire engineering college,” she says, “then the Wallace Scholars program is the heart of Wichita State’s College of Engineering.” For the 2012-13 academic year, 15 high school seniors have been awarded $300,000 in scholarships, with each Wallace Scholar receiving a four-year renewable scholarship for a total of $20,000.
This year, 2012, the year of Velma Wallace’s death on July 8 in Wichita, marks the 35th anniversary of the creation of the Wallace engineering scholarship program, which since 1976 has benefited some 600 engineering majors (270-plus graduates). “For me,” Wallace was fond of saying, “the support of young scholars has been something like the planting of a tree. I have watched that tree grow for many years and see its beauty. The seedlings from that tree have produced other trees, and their beauty also enhances the world.
“I now understand this is a process without end.”
