Joe Turner
Russ hired me for my first fulltime engineering position which was at Megahaus.
We worked together and shared an office over at Brooktree.
One day, in a casual conversation, I mentioned the story that my roommate had told me the night before. My roommate’s brother worked as a librarian in a small town and he told my friend of the encounter he had with someone in the library. This person had come in and told the librarian that he wanted to know “what holds a nail in the wall”.
When I mentioned this to Russ, his eyes lit up. He went to the whiteboard and spent quite a bit of time drawing force vectors and explaining ALL of the forces operating on the entire system. I explained Russ’s answer to my roommate that night as best I could. From then on, anything that came up that my friends were curious about was directed to the “AnswerMan”. He was the “AnswerMan” to my friends and me for the last 39 ½ years. My Daughters grew up hearing me say that “before there was Google, there was “The AnswerMan” (usually delivered in the best WWF announcer voice that I could manage).
In case you are wondering, the AnswerMan’s answer was mainly friction, but with other forces (cohesion, adhesion, gravity, etc.). Google gives you the same answers, but without Russ’s enthusiasm and the twinkle in his eye.
