Gordon R. Hamilton

In his own words...

This link http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/6943_1.html  points to an interview of Dr. Gordon Hamilton by Ron Doel on March 15, 1996, 
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park,  MD  USA.
Posted Nov. 2013

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I received word on Sept 20th 2014 of the passing of Gordon Hamilton.  He was Director of SOFAR from 1949 to 1972, moving the station from 3 buildings in St. David’s  staffed by handful of people into an organization with assets in many countries, and a staff around 150 to 200.  
B. Hallett Sept 2014.

Liz Laudadio:   "He sure was a great person and we were very lucky to have worked with him in Bermuda."

Wayne Garrison:  "The most interesting job interview I ever had was with Gordon Hamilton, the station boss."

Tom Graves:  "He was a fantastic boss.  He was an intuitive and problem solving scientist rather than a theoretician.  He was SOFAR Station."

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Gordon Ross Hamilton, age 91, passed away on September 15th at The Angel’s Garden, a nursing home in Rockville, Maryland.  He will be sorely missed by his family and many friends.  Gordon was born in Orleans, Vermont on April 20, 1923.  He was the third child and second son of Rollo Albert Hamilton, a Congregationalist minister and May Davina Ross Hamilton of Flushing, New York.
 Rollo ministered at churches scattered across Vermont, Massachusetts and New York, but contracted a severe ear infection in 1928 and died during mastoid surgery, leaving his wife May with four children to raise on her own.   Gordon was five at the time, while his eldest brother, Donald was fourteen.  May moved with her children back to Flushing and earned a license to teach.  
 
Gordon attended PS 107 and then Bayside High School where he was a good if uninspired   student.   Favorite memories included roaming the area on his bike and various scouting activities including upstate camping trips.   He earned Eagle Scout status in Troop 1 of Flushing, the troop his father, Rollo, had helped found during his days as a student minister (when he met and married May).

 May taught biology at Flushing High School for many years and her children all grew and flourished despite the hardships which the Great Depression inflicted upon  the country in the 1930’s. 

His older brother, Donald, earned admission to Princeton and gained a degree in physics which inspired Gordon to follow in his footsteps, also entering Princeton and also majoring in physics. 
Gordon was scheduled to graduate in 1944, but World War II intervened and he enrolled in an accelerated program to produce officers to lead the war effort.  So, in 1943, he enlisted as a midshipman in the Navy “to avoid the mud in the Army”.  He was assigned to a destroyer squadron in the Pacific as a radar technician, a very young technology which allowed ships to detect and attempt to avoid incoming aircraft as well as to monitor the movement of other ships in the squadron when the convoy would perform evasive maneuvers known by names such as “Zigzag Plan Six.”  According to Gordon, 40% of the officers in his Pacific squadron were lost during the war.  SONAR technology, using underwater sound to listen for enemy ships and submarines was  also a new technology and this would ultimately prove to be Gordon’s life calling.  Gordon was attending radar school in Pearl Harbor when the war ended.

Returning to the East Coast, he enrolled at Columbia on the GI bill in pursuit of a PhD in physics, again following in brother Donald’s footsteps. But before earning that degree, Columbia asked him to establish a field station to perform research in underwater sound.  So, in 1948, he and his new bride, Victoria Jean McKibben, who worked at Stouffers in New York as a dietician alongside Gordon’s sister, Elizabeth, moved to Bermuda and set up the SOFAR (Sound Fixing and Ranging) Station on Saint Davids Island directly adjacent to Kindley Air Force Base which shared Bermuda’s airport with commercial carriers.
 
Gordon remained in Bermuda until 1972, living first in St. Georges, and then moving in 1960 to Hamilton in Pembroke Parish where daughter, Libby, born in 1951, attended the Bermuda High School for Girls, and son, Gregg, born in 1954, attended Saltus Grammar School.
 
The SOFAR Station flourished during the 1960’s on the strength of research contracts performed on behalf of ONR (the US Office of Naval Research) to use underwater microphones to detect nuclear test detonations, submarine traffic, and missile splashes (with the purpose of calibrating the accuracy of the US military to deploy and aim multiple warheads).   Gordon was adept at designing and rigging electronics, undersea cables, microphone arrays, and recording equipment to solve problems which had never been tackled before, leveraging skills and “get-it-done” ingenuity and creativity acquired as a Boy Scout and honed as a radar tech in the Pacific theater.
 
Government contract work took him far afield to atolls and islands across both the Pacific and the Atlantic during the 1960’s, but in 1968, antiwar sentiment on the Columbia campus provoked Columbia to divest the SOFAR Station, and Gordon founded the Palisades Geophysical Institute to continue to fulfill and execute classified research for ONR.  In May, 1968, the USS Scorpion, a nuclear submarine of the Skipjack class went down, all hands lost, in the eastern Atlantic.  Gordon had microphones in the water attached to 24 hour recording devices in Bermuda, Cape Canaveral and the Canary slands, and examining these recordings he and his team was able to identify the sounds emitted by the descent and implosion of the Scorpion’s various compartments as it sank and was crushed at great depths. The resulting triangulation enabled the Navy to locate and photograph the remains of the vessel on the ocean floor.
 
In 1972, Gordon moved back to the US, taking a position as Director Naval Research at ONR after 24 years in Bermuda.  His wife, Vicky passed in 1993, and in 1994 he married Mickey Joanne Wilson of Rockville, Maryland and after retiring in 2007, he spent his final years finding much joy in gardening, travel and good food.

 He is survived by brother John Ross Hamilton; wife Mickey J. Hamilton; daughter Elizabeth Jean Hamilton Samuel (husband Cliff) and Gregg Ross Hamilton (wife Diane); grandsons Geoffrey Hamilton and Rollo Samuel, granddaughter Emily Hamilton; stepson Gil Wilson (wife Kathy) and Pamela David (husband Marc); step-grandson Kendrick Wilson and step-grandaughters Evelyn Wilson, Kitty Ulman and Monica Davis.

Gregg Hamilton.  Sept 2014