Suresh Kulkarni, a native of India and current resident of Perry, retired in 2003 from Thiokol (now ATK) after a successful 30-year career in engineering. Starting as a low-level design engineer, he eventually held the position of Vice President of Engineers in the company's Space Division. He was well-qualified for this work, having obtained a Master's degree in India and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Denver. In a 2007 oral history interview, he gave his parents credit for motivating him to get a good education:
During a trip back to India, I visited a very close friend whose dad ran a small tea shop. When I went back there, the son was running the tea shop because his father had passed away. He said to me, “You must not be very happy. You go out there and get your PhD, and you're working on the Space Program and putting up with all this stress. What are you trying to prove?”
I had never thought of it that way. He was very happy doing what his dad had done, which was running the tea shop, and here I was living in a foreign country and doing all of these things. I thought back to my village where my dad was born. He came from a very small village where there was no electricity, no water. He had to cross a river in order to go to school. In the rainy season when the river flooded, he would strap his books on the top of his head with a belt and swim to school. He went on to earn his PhD. Then he was a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chairman of the Department at the University, and my mom also had a PhD in Chemistry. So we were expected to have a very strong education.
We always had this feeling that we'd like to do something better than our parents. In India you grow up with the idea that you can never achieve what your parents achieved. It's very different from here. But in my family, my parents were always saying, “You have to do better than what we did.”
My sister is a medical doctor in the U.S. and Professor of Medicine at Michigan State University. She has just been made Director of Blood Disorders at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, and she has really established a name for herself.
When you ask a child here what he/she wants to do when they grow up, the typical answer is, “I don't know.” In India the influence of the parents is very strong. There was strong emphasis on education, and right from the beginning parents drilled into their children what they would be when they grew up. For example, as I was growing up, I knew I was going to be an engineer, and my sister knew that she would be a doctor. That's the way we grew up, and we always knew the answer when somebody asked what we wanted to be. It was a done deal.
I remember I was so scared of math in the second grade, and my mother is very, very good at it. I said, “I'm never going to get this.” So she spent all of that summer working with me trying to help me understand that in math you never try to memorize things. You try to figure out why it's done that way because there is a very logical way to do it. From then on I always scored 100%. It was just built in that I don't have to be afraid of it. There is nothing to discuss in math. Either you're right or you're wrong. There is no maybe.
After pondering my friend's question, I realize I would not change anything in my life because I'm so blessed with the family I have, with my wife Diane and our children and grandchildren. Now it's such a joy! I have the best of both worlds!
During a trip back to India, I visited a very close friend whose dad ran a small tea shop. When I went back there, the son was running the tea shop because his father had passed away. He said to me, “You must not be very happy. You go out there and get your PhD, and you're working on the Space Program and putting up with all this stress. What are you trying to prove?”
I had never thought of it that way. He was very happy doing what his dad had done, which was running the tea shop, and here I was living in a foreign country and doing all of these things. I thought back to my village where my dad was born. He came from a very small village where there was no electricity, no water. He had to cross a river in order to go to school. In the rainy season when the river flooded, he would strap his books on the top of his head with a belt and swim to school. He went on to earn his PhD. Then he was a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chairman of the Department at the University, and my mom also had a PhD in Chemistry. So we were expected to have a very strong education.
We always had this feeling that we'd like to do something better than our parents. In India you grow up with the idea that you can never achieve what your parents achieved. It's very different from here. But in my family, my parents were always saying, “You have to do better than what we did.”
My sister is a medical doctor in the U.S. and Professor of Medicine at Michigan State University. She has just been made Director of Blood Disorders at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, and she has really established a name for herself.
When you ask a child here what he/she wants to do when they grow up, the typical answer is, “I don't know.” In India the influence of the parents is very strong. There was strong emphasis on education, and right from the beginning parents drilled into their children what they would be when they grew up. For example, as I was growing up, I knew I was going to be an engineer, and my sister knew that she would be a doctor. That's the way we grew up, and we always knew the answer when somebody asked what we wanted to be. It was a done deal.
I remember I was so scared of math in the second grade, and my mother is very, very good at it. I said, “I'm never going to get this.” So she spent all of that summer working with me trying to help me understand that in math you never try to memorize things. You try to figure out why it's done that way because there is a very logical way to do it. From then on I always scored 100%. It was just built in that I don't have to be afraid of it. There is nothing to discuss in math. Either you're right or you're wrong. There is no maybe.
After pondering my friend's question, I realize I would not change anything in my life because I'm so blessed with the family I have, with my wife Diane and our children and grandchildren. Now it's such a joy! I have the best of both worlds!
Kathy Bradford
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