Attention NAE Members
Starting June 30, 2023, login credentials have changed for improved security. For technical assistance, please contact us at 866-291-3932 or helpdesk@nas.edu. For all other inquiries, please contact our Membership Office at 202-334-2198 or NAEMember@nae.edu.
Click here to login if you're an NAE Member
Recover Your Account Information
This is the 27th volume of Memorial Tributes compiled by the National Academy of Engineering as a personal remembrance of the lives and outstanding achievements of its members and international members. These volumes are intended to stand as an enduring record of the many contributions of engineers and engineering to the benefit of humankind. In most cases, the authors of the tributes are contemporaries or colleagues who had personal knowledge of the interests and the engineering accomplishments of the deceased. Through its members and international members, the Academy carries ...
This is the 27th volume of Memorial Tributes compiled by the National Academy of Engineering as a personal remembrance of the lives and outstanding achievements of its members and international members. These volumes are intended to stand as an enduring record of the many contributions of engineers and engineering to the benefit of humankind. In most cases, the authors of the tributes are contemporaries or colleagues who had personal knowledge of the interests and the engineering accomplishments of the deceased. Through its members and international members, the Academy carries out the responsibilities for which it was established in 1964.
Under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering was formed as a parallel organization of outstanding engineers. Members are elected on the basis of significant contributions to engineering theory and practice and to the literature of engineering or on the basis of demonstrated unusual accomplishments in the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology. The National Academies share a responsibility to advise the federal government on matters of science and technology. The expertise and credibility that the National Academy of Engineering brings to that task stem directly from the abilities, interests, and achievements of our members and international members, our colleagues and friends, whose special gifts we remember in this book.
Results Found
BY ROGER R. SCHMIDT AND ROBERT F. MCBEE
FRANK WILKINS MCBEE JR. passed away on April 7, 2000, at the age of 80 at his home in Austin, Texas. He is buried with his wife in Austin’s Texas State Cemetery.
Frank was born in Ridley Park (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, on Jan. 22, 1920. The son of a French-Canadian mother from upstate New York, Ruth E. Moulton, and father Frank Wilkins McBee Sr., who was a descendant of a pioneer Texas family, McBee was known as a consummate Texan: smart, tough, even gruff at times, but always a gentleman.
After growing up in Manor, Texas, and South Austin, sometimes actually riding his pet burro to a one-room schoolhouse, McBee entered engineering school at the University of Texas at Austin. His studies at the University of Texas at Austin were interrupted by World War II, but not before he married Sue Brandt McBee, editor of the Daily Texan and later named an Outstanding Alumnus of the UT College of Communications. After graduating from the United States Air Force Engineering Officers School at Yale and service in India, where he supervised the maintenance of bombers “flying the Hump” (the name given by Allied pilots in World War II to the eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains over which they flew military transport aircraft), McBee returned home to receive both a B.S.M.E. (1947) and an M.S.M.E. (1950) from the University of Texas at Austin.
McBee spent much of the 1950s teaching in UT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and as a supervisor in what was then called its Defense Research Lab, where he met physicist Richard N. Lane.1 With Lane and three friends he established a small company, Associated Consultants and Engineers (later Tracor), in a converted downtown Austin grocery store in the mid-1950s. At first primarily a research and development firm, the group soon began producing some of the ideas coming off its drafting tables. As cash flow grew, so did the company’s appetite for snatching up other businesses. Then, in the late 1960s, Tracor ventured forth with a line of computer products that nearly ended its meteoric rise for good. Profits plummeted, and so did the company’s cash reserves.
“We were probably broke and didn’t know it,’’ recalled McBee, looking back on the wreckage. There was, he said, a moral in the debacle: ‘‘Don’t attack IBM. Attack someone else.’’ McBee is credited with helping Tracor survive an unsuccessful effort to compete with IBM in computer hardware in the 1960s.
Like the relief pitcher who takes over with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, McBee came in as president in 1970. He dumped weak product lines and directed the company back to areas where its research was strongest.
McBee’s dedication to research and development at Tracor directly resulted in numerous patented, technological advancements, many of worldwide stature. These included the first change in automotive fusing in 60 years, the creation of specialized communications systems, and a new coextrusion wire technique that could revolutionize the battery industry — just to name a few. A second contributing factor to Tracor’s success was McBee’s innate ability to recognize those research projects that would translate into new and needed products in the marketplace. He used his special talent to organize a new company that would investigate the market potential of university research projects.
Tracor had served as a center for startup technology companies and was an example of efforts to more rapidly commercialize university technological discoveries or establish partnerships between universities and commercial firms. Tracor’s headquarters were located near the main University of Texas campus, and the firm had long obtained its junior scientists and engineers from among university graduate students.
The company quickly expanded to engage in various other activities, including engineering, manufacturing, and marketing of defense and commercial electronics. The firm was probably most widely known in the defense-electronics trade. It was the leading producer of “chaff” — a metallic material like steel wool dispensed by aircraft to confuse enemy radar. But it also manufactured scientific instruments, fuses for automobiles, sonar systems, and marine navigation equipment, among other things. It did extensive consulting work for the military in sonar- and antisubmarine-defensive systems. Tracor scientists were involved in marine, biomedical, and telecommunications research as well. The firm was a leading supplier of Omega navigation systems for ships and aircraft.
As the company grew from five employees to over 11,000 worldwide, it became Austin’s first homegrown Fortune 500 company and the first corporation headquartered in Austin to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.2 In addition to becoming president in 1970, McBee became chairman of the board in 1972. He continued in both positions until his retirement in 1988.
Tracor was founded at the start of an electronics business boom that produced Massachusetts’s Route 128 and California’s Silicon Valley and became a role model for entrepreneurs that made Austin a major player among high-tech research centers. McBee was credited with naming Austin the “Silicon Gulch.” He encouraged more than 20 former Tracor employees to start their own companies, fueling the development of this now-exploding sector of Austin’s economy.
In “retirement” McBee devoted himself to his private investments and to community work. Not just an entrepreneur, McBee bore a strong sense of civic duty. He was a trustee and fundraiser for St. Edward’s University, a trustee of the Seton Hospital Fund, board chairman of the Headliners Club for 10 years, and a two-year chairman of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. Active throughout many years with the Nature Conservancy, he also supported several arts enterprises, such as the Paramount Theatre, and was chairman of the board and a trustee for the Laguna Gloria Art Museum. He was also a sustaining member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and a member of the Austin Chamber of Commerce Economic Development Council.
He and his wife Sue were leaders in the preservation of Austin’s historic buildings and homes, the arts, and education. Frank and Sue McBee Elementary School was dedicated in 1999. McBee also found time to lead the Austin Yacht Club as commodore and was King Brio of the Austin Symphony in 1984.
McBee served on the Governor’s Task Force on Business Development and Jobs Creation, Governor’s Supercollider Advisory Council, and Lieutenant Governor’s Select Committee on Tax Equity. He was also trustee emeritus of the Broadcasting Council.
McBee served as senior member of the UT Engineering Foundation Advisory Council, chairman of the UT Department of Computer Sciences Endowment Committee, and member of the Advisory Council of the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University.
McBee was chairman of the board of Electrosource Inc. and Research Applications Inc., Austin; senior chairman of the board, MBank-Austin; and chairman of the American National Bank, Austin. He served as director of KMW Systems Corporation, Austin; MCorp-Dallas; Medical Systems Support Inc., Dallas; Pritronix Inc., Dallas; and Radian Corporation, Austin.
His honors and recognitions include induction into the Texas Business Hall of Fame (1990); Distinguished Alumni, UT Austin (1988); Clara Driscoll Award, Laguna Gloria Art Museum (1987); Austinite of the Year, Austin Chamber of Commerce (1986); Honorary Doctorate, St. Edward’s University, Austin (1986); Outstanding Engineer, Texas Society of Professional Engineers (1983); and Distinguished Alumnus, UT College of Engineering (1978). In 1981, he received the Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Among his many awards, he was especially proud of his election in 1989 to the National Academy of Engineering.
Sue, McBee’s wife of 57 years, died in 2011. He is survived by a daughter, Marilyn McBee Moore, and a son, Robert F. McBee. At the time of his death, Tracor, the company that McBee helped build, was ranked among the top 15 defense electronic companies in the United States.
_______________________________ 1Kleiner DJ. 1995. “Tracor” General Entry, Texas State Historical Society, Aug 1. 2Armstrong S. 1982. McBee of Tracor in high tech saddle. Christian Science Monitor, March 31.