15101 Shell Point Boulevard - Fort Myers, FL 33908
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FORT MYERS - Every resident at Shell Point has an interesting story to tell. Here's a look at three men who reside at Shell Point - They're Pioneers in Technology!

Eye in the Sky

Frank Hicks

Growing up in Kenmore, a suburb of Buffalo, New York, Frank Hicks wanted to be an electrical engineer since he was a boy of ten, when he became fascinated by the Morse code and crystal sets. When he finished high school a year ahead of schedule, he enrolled at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "If you grew up in the Depression, you'd concentrate on what you wanted to do," Hicks said. "You didn't have the luxury of time to explore other fields."

Hicks joined the Army Signal Corps ten months after Pearl Harbor. By virtue of a special Electronics Training Group program in the Army Signal Corps, Hicks completed requirements for his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in December 1943. He was on active duty from January 1944, until August 1946. Thanks to a teaching assignment at Rensselaer and the G.I. Bill, Hicks earned his Master's degree in Electrical Engineering and his Doctorate Degree in Applied Physics from Rensselaer. Leaving academia in July 1951, Hicks accepted a job offer from Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, that was to last thirty years.

When Dwight Eisenhower was President of the United States, the Cold War was heating up. It is said that President Eisenhower approached the CEO of Kodak and said, "We would like Kodak to help develop photographic systems for satellites." Kodak responded by putting a significant number of their employees into the effort, including Frank Hicks. Most of the work was highly classified; however, one project that was de-classified was the NASA Lunar Orbiter. During 1966, five Lunar Orbiter flights containing the Kodak photographic subsystem were all successful.

In general, photographs taken from satellites can be sent back to Earth either electronically or by physical recovery. Kodak handled both methods. In the early days the electronic recovery method used a Kodak product called Bimat to develop the film in a satellite. The negatives resulting from this process were scanned with a cathode ray tube. The resulting signal was transmitted to the ground, where a recording of the image was made on film. In the case of the lunar orbiter, that transmission was generally from 35 to 200 miles above the moon. This Lunar Orbiter photographic system allowed NASA to determine the location of the optimum sites for landing astronauts on the moon. The physical method of retrieval was used for earth reconnaissance photos taken by satellites at altitudes ranging from 80 miles to several hundred miles. A program called Corona, now declassified, used a series of satellites to circle Earth and take pictures for four or five days at a stretch - then the nose cone, which contained the film, would separate and parachute over the Pacific Ocean. The recovered film was processed and developed in Rochester and sent to Washington.  These programs involved leading edge technology - however, things didn't always go perfectly. Hicks has a piece of shrapnel from an Atlas booster that exploded over the launch pad.

Using his thirty years of accumulated knowledge, Hicks has written and delivered a course at the Academy, Shell Point's continuing education series, called "Satellites from the Cold War to 9/11."

Diving Deep

Gil and Cle Keeley

Gil Keeley was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and went to high school in Topeka, Kansas. After two years in pre-engineering at a junior college in Kansas City, he took and passed a test in 1942 to attend the Coast Guard Academy, where he served two years before enlisting in the Navy. Completing his naval duty, Keeley returned to his studies at the University of Missouri at Rolla - the engineering branch.

Degree in hand, he went to work in the nuclear power industry. Keeley worked with Westinghouse Navy Nuclear Power Plant, which had a contract to build the prototype for the first nuclear powered submarine, the Nautilus. Later, Consumers' Power Company lured Keeley to Michigan, where they were building a General Electric-type nuclear power plant. Once again, Keeley ran tests on the plant and obtained the first reactor operator's license on what became the Big Rock Point Nuclear Power Plant.

At Big Rock Point, problems arose in the reactor vessel where the nuclear fuel is located. "We decided to do underwater repair to fix the problem," Keeley said. "Our rad protection engineer was an ex-Navy frogman and I enjoyed SCUBA diving, so we did the work using Navy diving suits." After removing fuel from the reactor vessel, the men dropped through thirty feet of water past the vessel wall high radiation zone. Although they picked up only a low dose of radiation - equivalent to an X-ray or less - the dive wasn't without incident. The Navy diving suits had a triangular faceplate and two-way communication with a foam rubber earpiece. On the last day of diving, Keeley accidentally strapped his faceplate and earpiece too tightly. When he came back to the surface from the 30-foot depth, high pressure under the earpiece ruptured his inner ear and he lost all hearing in that ear.

About twelve years ago, Keeley expressed concern about his hearing loss to his wife, Cleora, a retired obstetrician and gynecologist. "I told her we're going to have trouble communicating if I ever lose the hearing in my other ear," Keeley said. Their church in Leesburg, Florida, offered a solution. They had a program for the deaf, with a great deaf interpreter and signing teacher, so the couple decided to take signing lessons.

Since moving to Shell Point, Keeley has taught sign language to residents. For four years, he volunteered to help teachers with deaf and hard-of-hearing students at Allen Park Elementary School. Subsequently, he helped two teachers at Fort Myers Middle School and, when one of those teachers moved to Fort Myers High School, he started helping her there. He now works two half-days a week, helping eight deaf and hard-of-hearing students with math. "I really enjoy it, and it keeps me busy," he said.

Gil and Cleora also do volunteer work at Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge - he in maintenance and she at the information desk.

Multiply What You've Learned

Ray and Yvonne Sheline

Ray Sheline got his undergraduate degree from Bethany College in West Virginia, after which he went on to work on the Manhattan Project. "At Columbia University, I had worked on the separation process. You have to separate uranium 235, the light isotope, from uranium 238. It's only the uranium 235 that will fission and create an atom bomb," he said. "At Los Alamos, I worked on the bomb mechanism."

After his discharge from the Army, Sheline enrolled in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. When his doctorate was complete, he moved to the University of Chicago as an instructor. While at the University of Chicago, he moved into the field of nuclear spectroscopy. "One nucleus is about one hundred-thousandth the size of an atom. Although it is extremely tiny, the nucleus contains almost all the mass of an atom and its energy is a million times greater. That's why, when you have a nuclear process going like fission, you can get so much energy," he said.

For the rest of his career he studied the structure of nuclei. During his second year at the University of Chicago, Sheline met his wife, Yvonne. The child of missionary parents, she had just returned from Africa, where she had been teaching. She planned to get a master's degree and go back to the Congo. "I persuaded her to stay with me instead," he said. "As a result of that, we have seven children - five boys and two girls. Of the seven, five are medical doctors and one is a geophysicist. The other has a Ph.D. and works in neurology."

Early in their marriage, Ray and Yvonne moved to Tallahassee, when he accepted a position at Florida State University. Originally a women's college, it was just becoming a university at the time. While he taught in the department of chemistry, he did research in the department of physics and was eventually officially made part of both departments. Over the course of his career, Sheline gave lectures at the Universities of Warsaw; Moscow; Leningrad (now St. Petersburg); the University of Tokyo; the Australian National University; Uppsala, in Oslo and Ein Shams, Sweden; and the University of Cairo, Egypt. The family also spent time in Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and Australia, where he lectured and did research.

Each of the children also spent time in the Congo to see the country where Yvonne had grown up. When Yvonne got her Ph.D. in international education, both she and Ray went to the University of Kinshasa in Africa as Fulbright professors. They returned twice more to conduct research and allow Ray to teach nuclear physics to the African students. Yvonne wrote booklets for elementary students, as well as a book on AIDS, written in her native language, Kikongo.

The Shelines developed their own foreign exchange student program for their children, using contacts they had developed in their travels and through the many graduate students Ray had supervised. Ray takes great pride in the many students whose lives he has touched. "Fifty-seven people got doctorates under my direction," he said. "That's an unusually high number, even for forty-eight years. I had about thirty post-doctoral fellows who came specifically to study with me, mostly from abroad. The science you study is a cold, dead thing sometimes, but the students are living. They can go out and multiply what they've learned. I feel prouder of my students than of my research!"

After spending 48 years at FSU, Ray retired in 1999, but has continued to do research and publish papers. For recreation, Sheline plays flute in an informal chamber music group and in the Shell Point Orchestra.

These three Shell Point residents exemplify a small sampling of the richness of knowledge and the depth of experience that truly made them Pioneers in Technology!

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