Daniel Fry - Professional Life

Professional Life

In his professional life, he worked as a "powder man" or explosives supervisor in the 1930s and 1940s on such jobs as the Salinas Dam near San Luis Obispo, California, for the Basic Magnesium Corporation and on the Pan American Highway in Honduras. From 1949 until 1954, Daniel worked at Aerojet designing, building and installing transducers for control, feedback and measurement of rockets during flight and static tests. From 1954 onward, Fry helped build the Crescent Engineering & Research Company into a multimillion dollar company along with the founder, Edmund Vail Sawyer, eventually becoming the Vice President of Research and a stockholder. Crescent made parts related to rockets including transducers, and did JATO rocket nozzle rework during the war.

In the early 1960s Fry sold his share in Crescent and moved to Merlin, Oregon where he ran the Merlin Development Company until moving to Tonopah, Arizona in the 1970s. There he looked after Enid Smith until her death and managed her estate including property she had donated to Understanding, Inc. Shortly before Understanding ceased to function in 1979, Daniel retired to Alamogordo, New Mexico but a few years later restarted publication of the Understanding newsletter, by now reduced to a single 8" x 14" page, which he continued until 1989.