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Note: 630 W. Howell St. Ridgecrest
CA
93555-3417
Longtime resident Frederick Christian Alpers passed away Wednesday, July 26, 2006.
Fred was born June 7, 1921 in Wheeling, WV. He earned a master's degree in physics from Yale University and was awarded an honory doctorate in guided missile systems. He was a physicist for 35 years and worked at China Lake for many years.
Frederick C. Alpers '42 , on July 26, 2006. He was eighty-five and a resident of Ridgecrest, California.
Born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on June 7, 1921, Fred graduated from Linsly Military Institute in 1939. At Kenyon, where he was a member of Delta Phi fraternity and participated in track, Fred majored in physics, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in three years. In 1943, he earned an MS in physics from Yale University and took an intensive short course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the newly developing technology of radio detection and ranging, or radar. During World War II, Fred worked at the famous RadLab at MIT for the Bureau of Standards, helping to develop the Bat, the first active-guided missile ever used in combat. After the end of the war, he stayed with the Bureau of Standards, moving to Washington, D.C., to work with Hugh Dryden, the future head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
In 1952, when the bureau transferred its missile-development work to the Navy, Fred moved to California to work for the Naval Ordnance Lab (NOL) at Corona, California, on such systems as the Petrel, Puffin, Moth, Avocet, and Battu. He served as head of the guidance division and later was promoted to associate head, missile systems division, working on Sidewinder, Talos, Walleye, and Standard anti-radiation missiles. In 1971, Fred transferred, along with most of the NOL missile functions, to China Lake, California, where he worked on SHRIKE; other anti-radiation weapons; and the ship program, SWATH, as well as early remotely piloted vehicles in the radio frequency division of the electronic warfare department. Fred retired in 1981 but continued to serve as a consultant until the late 1980s.
Fred received more than sixty patents for missile guidance during his career. He was awarded the L.T.E. Thompson Award, the
Haske G. Wilson Award, the Department of Commerce Meritorious Service Award, and the Arthur S. Flemming Award as one of the country's top ten young scientists of 1959. In 1964, he was personally promoted by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the GS-16 grade.
Fred is survived by his wife of sixty years, the former Elizabeth Anne Sheffer; his daughter and son-in-law, Marilyn and Dean LeMieux, of Lake Forest, California; and two sons, the Reverend Frederick G. Alpers, of Glendale, Arizona, and Alan Alpers, of Oxnard, California.
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