Eulogy for Harry Edward Lockery
June 26, 2012
By Shawn Lockery
Today – in Sudbury, Mass and Dankotuwa, Sri Lanka – we celebrate the life of Harry
Lockery: husband, father, uncle, cousin, business partner, colleague, teacher, work-out
buddy, sailor, and songster. Harry touched the lives of many people in many ways – in
work and family, at home and abroad, in politics and in playfulness. He was a man of
remarkable achievements in his professional life, but he preferred that our attention was
directed to people other than himself. Nevertheless, we came to know him and were
blessed by his presence in our lives.
Within the outlines of Harry's biography there can be painted a classical picture of the
American dream. Smart working-class kid gets a break and goes to an Ivy League college;
marries feisty beauty, has three rambunctious sons; rides the postwar technology boom,
leading a series of successful engineering companies; lays down a track-record of
innovative technologies that revolutionizes a major sphere of national and international
commerce.
Remarkably, Harry's real story is more true to the American dream than even Horatio Alger
could have imagined. An only child of working class parents soon to be divorced, he was
raised by stern step-grandparents in depression-era New Haven. One day he made the
mistake of refusing to apologize for “sassing” his grandmother. As punishment, his
grandfather stopped speaking until he apologized; grandfather was silent for a year. For
pocket money, Harry once balanced on one foot on the top of a telephone pole.
Intellectually precocious, he skipped a grade in school, and as a 15-year old boy during
the war, ran his own radio repair shop. He was a springboard diver on his high school
swim team. His big break came when he was discovered by Phil Moriarity, the Yale diving
coach. Phil, who would become his true father figure, wrangled him a job poolside at
Yale's Payne-Whitney Gymnasium. Phil also got him switched from the trade track to the
college preparatory track at high school. Propelled by the prospect of getting into Yale,
now suddenly real, Harry's grades soared. He won a scholarship and a spot in the class of
1948. He was 17 years old when he entered college a week after graduating from high
school.
As an undergraduate, Harry delved immediately into electrical engineering. Although he
dutifully signed up for the required liberal arts courses, he would secretly switch them
back to engineering classes. Outside the lab and lecture hall, Harry was a cheerleader
(remember, Yale was all men in those days. A-recaca cex coex coex!), and an All-American
diving champion on the swimming team.
After college, Harry rose quickly in his profession. By the age of 30 he was running a
department of 70 engineers at Baldwin, Lima, Hamilton (BLH), a prominent engineering
firm in Waltham, Mass. There he led the team that designed the first onboard weighing
system for large passenger airplanes (like the Boeing 747). He also led the team that built
the system for measuring the thrust of the Saturn V rocket, which would eventually take
our astronauts to the Moon.
In the maturity of his career, Harry started two successful engineering companies:
Hottinger Baldwin Measurements and Flintec. He ultimately became a legend in the field
of electronic force measurement. Those of us "of a certain age" will remember Dick
Fosbury, the legendary Olympic high jumper who developed a technique that became
known as the Fosbury Flop, in which the jumper clears the bar head first and backward.
Highly unconventional and almost without antecedents, the Fosbury Flop has now
replaced all previous high jump techniques. I recently learned that in industry, such a
radical development has a special name. It is called a "disruptive technology," and it’s
every company’s dream. Coming up with a major disruptive technology is a sign of genius.
Harry came up with three, and one of them is, or eventually will be, in almost every
grocery store check-out station across the nation.
Although it is Harry Lockery's inventions that the world will notice, it is his remarkable self
that we all will miss.
We all will miss his fatherly concern, not just for his sons for but also for members of our
wider family whose father was not with us, and for the engineers and technicians he
tutored in the US and abroad.
We all will miss his common sense, and the tactfulness with which he delivered it. One
night long ago, I called him from London to say my British sweetheart and I were thinking
of getting married tomorrow, so we could live together in the US. He calmly said, "Let me
see if I understand, Shawn. Did you just say that you want to get married, so you could
live together to see if you want to get married?" That simple question changed my mind in
a flash, yet it didn’t hurt.
We all will miss his generosity. A child of the depression, he loved to give presents, and
always sought the best. Christmas morning could be overwhelming.
We all will miss his no-holds-barred approach to problem solving. The family remembers
the time he rushed his grandson Macon, 5 days old and seriously ill, to Mass General
Hospital. It was 9:00 pm and snowing hard, masking the edges of the road. He missed a
critical turn and, forced to extemporize, he took the next left, but immediately lost sight of
the hospital. Fortunately, a loan pedestrian pointed the way, cautiously noting that he was
driving through the nearby park.
We all will miss his obvious delight in thinking outside the box, not just in his work, but
with us at home, where he praised us for this quality that was so fundamental to his
nature.
We all will miss his genuine interest in who we were, and what we did, and what we
thought. For Harry the problem solver, there was no such thing as a ridiculous suggestion,
and that was almost certainly one of the reasons for his many successes in life.
We all will miss wonderful his belly laugh. In fact, let me tell you one his favorite jokes:
The joke concerns twin boys of five or six. Worried that the boys had developed extreme
personalities — one was a total pessimist, the other a total optimist — their parents took them to a
psychiatrist. First the psychiatrist treated the pessimist. Trying to brighten his outlook, the
psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with brand-new toys. But instead of yelping with
delight, the little boy burst into tears. ”What’s the matter?” the psychiatrist asked, baffled. “Don’t
you want to play with any of the toys?” “Yes,” the little boy bawled, “but if I did I’d only break
them.” Next the psychiatrist treated the optimist. Trying to dampen his out look, the psychiatrist
took him to a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. But instead of wrinkling his nose in
disgust, the optimist emitted just the yelp of delight the psychiatrist had been hoping to hear from
his brother, the pessimist. Then he clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to his knees, and
began gleefully digging out scoop after scoop with his bare hands. ”What do you think you’re
doing?” the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. “With
all this manure,” the little boy replied, beaming, “there must be a pony in here somewhere!” We all will miss his optimism. Unlike many of us, myself included, Harry never had to
remind himself to be optimistic, much less to pretend it. He truly saw that pony. It was this
gift, more than any other, that made him the inspirational leader he became, and gave his
life its story-book plot.
Finally we all will miss his commitment to fairness and social justice. My cousin Sarah
said to me the other day that in this respect, Harry’s moral compass never failed him, and
his rational mind always knew when the rhetoric didn't add up. We saw this commitment
not only in his political activities but also in his professional life, where he insisted that his
factories in Sri Lanka would be run not by outsiders, but by the Sri Lankans themselves.
Harry ultimately succeeded in this goal.
And so that is how Harry Lockery lived. Watching him in action, being the focus of his
powerful intellect, his energies, his love, we have taken little parts of him and made them
our own. He has helped us all become more innovative, yet practical; optimistic, yet
grounded in common sense; confident, yet open hearted; ambitious yet tender; successful,
yet committed to social justice. And, he has made us all more ready to sail over the bars of
our troubles, head-first and backward. That is his legacy.
Finally, I wish to close by paraphrasing Barak Obama in his Eulogy for Ted Kennedy:
"We cannot know for certain how long we have here. We cannot foresee the trials or misfortunes
that will test us along the way. What we can do is to live out our lives as best we can with purpose,
and love, and joy. We can use each day to show those who are closest to us how much we care
about them, and treat others with the kindness and respect that we wish for ourselves. And we can
strive at all costs to make the world a better place, so that someday, if we are blessed with the
chance to look back on our time here, we can know that we spent it well; that we made a
difference; that our fleeting presence had a lasting impact on the lives of other human beings."