Now that Professor Kirk has announced his retirement from contributing articles to The Shot Peener magazine, I am reminiscing about our long relationship. We all have special people in our lives that have made big differences. For me, Professor David Kirk is at the top of my list of special people. I remember meeting him the first time in 1993 at the 5th International Conference on Shot Peening (ICSP5) in Oxford. We stayed in dorm rooms on the Oxford campus—the students were on vacation. The rooms were quite large with very tall ceilings and the bathroom was down the hall. I got the feeling of being a student all over again. (I could now tell my friends that I attended Oxford.) The conference room was nearby and with the students gone we had the campus all to ourselves.
I noticed Dr. Kirk was quite busy and seemed to be doing a one-man show using only a staff member to run the projector. Dr. Kirk performed all the steps needed for a successful conference. He received the manuscripts and assembled them into proper categories and then pre-printed the proceedings for availability at the conference. He then reprinted the final program, eliminating the papers that were not presented by their authors. I purchased a large quantity for re-sale at our website and later converted each document into a PDF for on-line sharing.
Upon meeting David in person at ICSP5, he asked me to serve on the international committee. I was given the honor of sitting at the “High Table” at the conference banquet. That indeed was a high honor. After the dinner, I joined the committee for the triennial meeting and answered questions about venues in the United States. I described several choices since I had experience with planning our annual U.S. shot peening workshops. I thought it was unusual that the questions kept coming back to San Francisco. The committee voted on that site and the following day I visited David at his office. I saw a calendar with photos of San Francisco on his office wall. Mystery solved.
After spending time with Professor Kirk, I was so impressed with his knowledge of the shot peening process that I asked him to write for The Shot Peener.
This was the beginning of a long and treasured friendship.
