Tempting Fate: Hobey Baker and Robert Stiles Face The Red Baron’s Flying Circus

Richard Stiles Greeley, Robert Stiles’ nephew, is an avid football and ice hockey enthusiast, having played JV football as a freshman and varsity hockey four years at Harvard. He continued playing hockey into his fifties. He follows the sports at both the college and professional levels. He experienced combat during the Korean War, dueling with his ship’s 5＂ guns with Communist shore batteries. He has used these experiences to frame his non-fiction book about his two World War I heroes, Hobey Baker of Princeton and Robert Stiles of Harvard. He has recently (2013) written two romantic novels: the first ＂Emmie and Roger - A Thermonuclear Romance＂ is based on his experiences at the 1962 US thermonuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere off Christmas Island over the Pacific Ocean and his participation in the Cuban Missile Crisis later in 1962 at the Mitre Corporation; the second novel is the sequel, ＂Flight from Hanoi Into the Terror of the Ho Chi Minh Trail＂ based on his experiences in Saigon and Thailand during the Vietnam War in 1967-’68. More recently he has become an advocate for alternative energy systems, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal and, yes, nuclear to minimize the major threat to the future of the planet through global warming. He wrote the first Federal report on ＂Energy Use and Climate Change＂ for the National Science Foundation in 1975 and has been urging action ever since. He conducted one of the first successful demonstrations of using tidal power to generate electricity in 2004. At the Mitre Corporation he contributed to the early environmental legislation on the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Superfund Act; and helped initiate programs in solar, geothermal, wind, and tidal power for the US Department of Energy. He holds a B. S. degree in chemistry from Harvard, an M. S. degree in physical chemistry from Northwestern, and a Ph. D. degree in physical chemistry with a minor in nuclear engineering from the University of Tennessee based on work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He served for three years in the US Navy aboard the destroyer USS Van Valkenburgh, DD-656, seeing action behind enemy lines in North Korea. He was promoted to Chief Engineering Officer in 1953. Now retired, he is continuing to write fiction and non-fiction. A native of the Boston, MA area, he now lives in St. Davids, Pennsylvania.