Inspiring Young Scientists
Lloyd Beckett remembers the senior-class portrait in Lobby 7 well. It was very noisy, and when President Killian appeared on the second-floor balcony overlooking the lobby, the crowd roared. Other than that, he says, the media coverage wasn't a big deal. Still, Beckett enjoyed the perks associated with being a sought-after MIT grad. He started out as a chemical engineer at Acushnet Process in New Bedford, MA, earning $100 a week. "Thought I was fat, dumb, and happy," he says with characteristic humor. After stints doing R&D in the U.S. Air Force and as an industrial-liaison officer at MIT, he joined Polaroid in 1965. There, he eventually became the manager of the engineering division's labs, which designed cameras and other hardware.

All the while, he cultivated his interests in photography and affordable housing. He taught photography classes for adults at the local high school in Lexington, MA, where he lived at the time. And he teamed up with members of his church to build 14 units of low- and moderate­-income housing "before it became fashionable for towns to do it," he recalls, and despite strong municipal resistance. When his youngest child finished high school, Beckett built a solar home in Bedford. Ever the engineer, he carefully monitored the annual percentage of heat and hot water provided by sunlight. "My original calculations were that it would be 85 percent, but it turned out to be a little more efficient than that. It was 87 or 88 percent," he says.

When Polaroid came under the threat of a hostile takeover, Beckett served on a committee developing a severance package for employees. "We came up with a plan, presented it to the board of directors, they said, ‘Yes, go ahead with it, and does anybody want it?' and I put up my hand," Beckett says with a laugh. The early-retirement package came at a perfect time, because Beckett, then 54, had another career in mind: teaching. It was something he had been thinking about for a while, especially since he loved teaching photography. But the real impetus for change was the death of his 25-year-old son-in-law in a plane crash that same year. "It was a wake-up call to everybody in the family about how much time do you have, and why put off doing the things that you want to do?" he says.

He got his MEd from Lesley University in 1989 and decided to teach middle-school math and science. ("My wife said that proved that I was crazy; before it was just a suspicion," Beckett says.) He chose middle school in part to help keep girls interested in math and science at an age when they risk becoming disengaged. Being a teacher was "invigorating," he says. "It was like being born again." He spent 12 years at Boston-area independent schools and a charter school before retiring--this time for real.

Beckett's accomplishments, like Ronat's and Viterbi's, are no surprise to Kaming, who knows of his classmates' richly varied experiences from the bios they've sent him. There's Robert Ackerberg, a retired chemical-­engineering professor who in 1983 formed the Massapequa Philharmonic Orchestra in New York, and Ebrahim Victory, a former NASA researcher who has written, produced, and hosted an astronomy program in the Farsi language. "In the same way in a football season there are preseason favorites," says Kaming, "we were designated by Life as those graduates who would make a difference. And lo and behold, that proved to be correct

[click here for images of 1956 Class members]