I split this question out to a separate thread. Gumby, you'll have to add your story too. Anyone else?
Driving to the Naval Reactors offices was a logistical challenge because an AirFlorida jet had crashed into the 14th St Bridge* the week before, closing it to traffic and totally snarling the DC commute. So we boarded the bus at 3 AM (four hours each way) and some of us didn't get home until after 8 PM. We were excused from classes, drill, & watchstanding but of course we had to make up all our assignments.
The NR staff started with three "technical" interviews. They'd ask questions in your major and on general math/heat transfer/engineering topics. If you were there of your own free will you'd try to do well. If you'd been "encouraged" to interview then you displayed varying degrees of stupidity-- for example too dumb to handle fluid thermodynamics yet still smart enough to handle the EE topics that you'd need for flight school.
Two years before our interviews, the Class of '80 hadn't put forth enough nuclear volunteers and several more candidates were issued special invitations to help make quota. These "volunteers" really wanted to go Navy Air so they weren't very supportive of NR's interview process. Their somewhat churlish "poor performance" and lack of motivation had earned the USNA Supe (an aviator) a personal call from the Admiral, so even two years later the USNA administration was taking an intense interest in making sure that we were respectful and cooperative. They didn't want a repeat of the infamous '80 candidate whom Rickover asked "'Schirmer'?!? What the heck kind of name is that?!?" "Sir, it's German for 'pilot', sir!"
So after a rousing morning of interviews (perhaps a bonus round or two for marginal contenders), tensions were running high. We got yummy box lunches and went into the holding tank to await the big show, which had no definite ending time. Back then everyone at NR wore civilian attire but I learned later that the guys shepherding us around were full Navy captains. One of them would sit behind you during the Rickover interview just for the purpose of pulling your foot out of your mouth.
We were actually briefed with a flip chart of several scale floorplans of the Admiral's office. (It was about 10'x 15', 1960s vinyl floor squares, no carpet, with metal desks & filing cabinets. I had bigger & better offices when I was a lieutenant.) Little footprints showed how we'd enter, where we'd sound off, and where we'd sit. (No doubt today NR uses animated PowerPoint slides.) We were encouraged to think before opening our mouths, but not for too long. (Of course we'd heard all the Rickover urban legends and so we agreed with that advice.) We were told when the Admiral said "That's all" we should run for our lives like Shaggy & Scoobie-Doo promptly yet courteously depart without tripping over our feet. Because we were someday going to be nukes, we actually practiced in a vacant office with a chair.
The Admiral had a somewhat parsimonious reputation and it had probably been decades since his last uniform inspection, so when I saw him behind his desk he was wearing a uniform that was about two sizes too big. A scrawny little neck was sticking out from a huge shirt collar atop a jacket that made him look like he was shrinking into a bobblehead. (Of course at the time this was not the least bit amusing.) The chair was a standard wooden classroom chair (no arms) with just enough room in front of his desk to sit down in it. For those of you who've heard of the "special chair" with cut-down front legs to make you lean forward and slide off the seat, this was just a standard chair. That "special chair" had probably been retired and donated to the Smithsonian.
He asked me how much I studied every night. "Four to five hours, sir." (I had recently nailed a 4.00 GPA so I was feeling even more cocky than usual.) He asked how often I thought my classmates studied. I replied "At least three hours a night, sir" and he asked why I chose that number. "It's the minimum, sir." He asked if I thought it was fair to assume that they studied the minimum, or if some of them tried harder and studied more, and whether this applied to the junior classes as well. I thought he was asking one o' them there rhetorical questions so I was keeping my mouth shut when he slammed both hands on the desk and shouted "ANSWER THE QUESTION!" I froze like a headlighted deer just before impact so the highly-trained quick-thinking O-6 behind me saved my life by saying "Sir, the midshipmen thinks that the Admiral's question was rhetorical." I began nodding my own bobblehead imitation and was told "That's all." A few days later I was informed that I was a member of the club.
Other midshipman weren't so lucky. One company mate, Steve, was a political science major. The Admiral opined "Political science?!? Why the hell are you studying that-- are you going to run for division officer?" (Steve is in the Air Force now.) At least a dozen were invited to write monthly letters to the Admiral detailing their study hours, their grades, and their plans for the next month. (Of course this was tracked by the chain of command because the Admiral read all of them and didn't hesitate to respond to muddied thinking.) One guy was interviewed three times (three separate days' worth of bus trips) before NR decided they just couldn't take a chance on him.
Another classmate, Tom, had it even worse. As the interview moment approached we were told that we'd be called in based on our staff-interview performance. (We weren't told whether that was good or bad.) Tom had finished his box lunch and now desperately had to visit the bathroom, but we'd been warned that the interviews would start at any moment. He finally broke and went to the bathroom "just for a minute", so of course less than 10 seconds later his name was called for the first interview. (A quarter-century later he still gets teased about spending his Rickover interview hiding in the bathroom puking his guts out.) When the Admiral learned he was in the bathroom and not yet ready, Tom was sent to the back of the line. After a three-hour wait, in the first minute of his interview he was ejected for poor logic and inarticulate answers, banished to a closet (a very small office with just a chair) to reconsider his performance, and told that he'd be interviewed later that day. This wasn't too unusual and we'd been briefed on the contingency so he quietly waited (no bathroom calls this time). Four hours later, as they were locking up the building for the night, one of the captains noticed the light in the room. He opened the door, gulped, and told Tom to go sit in the waiting room. He brought Tom a sandwich and told him that the Admiral would complete the interview tomorrow. (The unspoken truth was that they had just forgotten about him and resumed their normal business. And none of us mids were going to ask questions about our MIA classmate!) They put him in a cab and sent back to Annapolis, where he arrived by 9 PM-- just in time to get a few hours' sleep before boarding the 3 AM bus for interview #2. He was eventually turned down and applied for a transfer to the Air Force, where he had a great time.
Rickover had a reputation for stealing the best away from the rest. In addition to the 1980 "nuclear draft", he had even prevailed upon USNA to adjust its academics so that 80% of the mids were in engineering/science majors and only 20% were in non-tech majors like history, English, & economics. (Everyone still had engineering & leadership required classes.) Before making our final service selection, I was most interested in being a submariner but still tried to hedge my bets by interviewing with a couple other communities. Each interview lasted about 90 seconds and ended right after the second question: "Have you interviewed with ADM Rickover? Did you pass? OK, thanks for stopping by!"
When I chose nuclear power I was awarded a $3000 bonus. Including that bonus, my taxable pay for 1982 was $9929...
OK, Gumby, your turn!
* DC101's local bad-boy disk jockey called Air Florida (on the air) and inquired of their staff whether they'd be making the 14th St Bridge a regular flight. The public outcry to this notorious stunt eventually inspired him to migrate to NYC. His name is Howard Stern.
Yeah, we were lucky enough to meet the kindly old gentleman three days before he retired. John Lehman, that young pissant (Rickover's term), had just taken over SECNAV and his first official act was to force Rickover into retirement, so you can imagine that the admiral was not in the jolliest of moods. 25 years later I can recall this two-minute trauma interview more clearly than I can remember my wedding ceremony.SoonToRetire said:
Driving to the Naval Reactors offices was a logistical challenge because an AirFlorida jet had crashed into the 14th St Bridge* the week before, closing it to traffic and totally snarling the DC commute. So we boarded the bus at 3 AM (four hours each way) and some of us didn't get home until after 8 PM. We were excused from classes, drill, & watchstanding but of course we had to make up all our assignments.
The NR staff started with three "technical" interviews. They'd ask questions in your major and on general math/heat transfer/engineering topics. If you were there of your own free will you'd try to do well. If you'd been "encouraged" to interview then you displayed varying degrees of stupidity-- for example too dumb to handle fluid thermodynamics yet still smart enough to handle the EE topics that you'd need for flight school.
Two years before our interviews, the Class of '80 hadn't put forth enough nuclear volunteers and several more candidates were issued special invitations to help make quota. These "volunteers" really wanted to go Navy Air so they weren't very supportive of NR's interview process. Their somewhat churlish "poor performance" and lack of motivation had earned the USNA Supe (an aviator) a personal call from the Admiral, so even two years later the USNA administration was taking an intense interest in making sure that we were respectful and cooperative. They didn't want a repeat of the infamous '80 candidate whom Rickover asked "'Schirmer'?!? What the heck kind of name is that?!?" "Sir, it's German for 'pilot', sir!"
So after a rousing morning of interviews (perhaps a bonus round or two for marginal contenders), tensions were running high. We got yummy box lunches and went into the holding tank to await the big show, which had no definite ending time. Back then everyone at NR wore civilian attire but I learned later that the guys shepherding us around were full Navy captains. One of them would sit behind you during the Rickover interview just for the purpose of pulling your foot out of your mouth.
We were actually briefed with a flip chart of several scale floorplans of the Admiral's office. (It was about 10'x 15', 1960s vinyl floor squares, no carpet, with metal desks & filing cabinets. I had bigger & better offices when I was a lieutenant.) Little footprints showed how we'd enter, where we'd sound off, and where we'd sit. (No doubt today NR uses animated PowerPoint slides.) We were encouraged to think before opening our mouths, but not for too long. (Of course we'd heard all the Rickover urban legends and so we agreed with that advice.) We were told when the Admiral said "That's all" we should run for our lives like Shaggy & Scoobie-Doo promptly yet courteously depart without tripping over our feet. Because we were someday going to be nukes, we actually practiced in a vacant office with a chair.
The Admiral had a somewhat parsimonious reputation and it had probably been decades since his last uniform inspection, so when I saw him behind his desk he was wearing a uniform that was about two sizes too big. A scrawny little neck was sticking out from a huge shirt collar atop a jacket that made him look like he was shrinking into a bobblehead. (Of course at the time this was not the least bit amusing.) The chair was a standard wooden classroom chair (no arms) with just enough room in front of his desk to sit down in it. For those of you who've heard of the "special chair" with cut-down front legs to make you lean forward and slide off the seat, this was just a standard chair. That "special chair" had probably been retired and donated to the Smithsonian.
He asked me how much I studied every night. "Four to five hours, sir." (I had recently nailed a 4.00 GPA so I was feeling even more cocky than usual.) He asked how often I thought my classmates studied. I replied "At least three hours a night, sir" and he asked why I chose that number. "It's the minimum, sir." He asked if I thought it was fair to assume that they studied the minimum, or if some of them tried harder and studied more, and whether this applied to the junior classes as well. I thought he was asking one o' them there rhetorical questions so I was keeping my mouth shut when he slammed both hands on the desk and shouted "ANSWER THE QUESTION!" I froze like a headlighted deer just before impact so the highly-trained quick-thinking O-6 behind me saved my life by saying "Sir, the midshipmen thinks that the Admiral's question was rhetorical." I began nodding my own bobblehead imitation and was told "That's all." A few days later I was informed that I was a member of the club.
Other midshipman weren't so lucky. One company mate, Steve, was a political science major. The Admiral opined "Political science?!? Why the hell are you studying that-- are you going to run for division officer?" (Steve is in the Air Force now.) At least a dozen were invited to write monthly letters to the Admiral detailing their study hours, their grades, and their plans for the next month. (Of course this was tracked by the chain of command because the Admiral read all of them and didn't hesitate to respond to muddied thinking.) One guy was interviewed three times (three separate days' worth of bus trips) before NR decided they just couldn't take a chance on him.
Another classmate, Tom, had it even worse. As the interview moment approached we were told that we'd be called in based on our staff-interview performance. (We weren't told whether that was good or bad.) Tom had finished his box lunch and now desperately had to visit the bathroom, but we'd been warned that the interviews would start at any moment. He finally broke and went to the bathroom "just for a minute", so of course less than 10 seconds later his name was called for the first interview. (A quarter-century later he still gets teased about spending his Rickover interview hiding in the bathroom puking his guts out.) When the Admiral learned he was in the bathroom and not yet ready, Tom was sent to the back of the line. After a three-hour wait, in the first minute of his interview he was ejected for poor logic and inarticulate answers, banished to a closet (a very small office with just a chair) to reconsider his performance, and told that he'd be interviewed later that day. This wasn't too unusual and we'd been briefed on the contingency so he quietly waited (no bathroom calls this time). Four hours later, as they were locking up the building for the night, one of the captains noticed the light in the room. He opened the door, gulped, and told Tom to go sit in the waiting room. He brought Tom a sandwich and told him that the Admiral would complete the interview tomorrow. (The unspoken truth was that they had just forgotten about him and resumed their normal business. And none of us mids were going to ask questions about our MIA classmate!) They put him in a cab and sent back to Annapolis, where he arrived by 9 PM-- just in time to get a few hours' sleep before boarding the 3 AM bus for interview #2. He was eventually turned down and applied for a transfer to the Air Force, where he had a great time.
Rickover had a reputation for stealing the best away from the rest. In addition to the 1980 "nuclear draft", he had even prevailed upon USNA to adjust its academics so that 80% of the mids were in engineering/science majors and only 20% were in non-tech majors like history, English, & economics. (Everyone still had engineering & leadership required classes.) Before making our final service selection, I was most interested in being a submariner but still tried to hedge my bets by interviewing with a couple other communities. Each interview lasted about 90 seconds and ended right after the second question: "Have you interviewed with ADM Rickover? Did you pass? OK, thanks for stopping by!"
When I chose nuclear power I was awarded a $3000 bonus. Including that bonus, my taxable pay for 1982 was $9929...
OK, Gumby, your turn!
* DC101's local bad-boy disk jockey called Air Florida (on the air) and inquired of their staff whether they'd be making the 14th St Bridge a regular flight. The public outcry to this notorious stunt eventually inspired him to migrate to NYC. His name is Howard Stern.
