My Grandpa

An Interview with Cliff Kowall

By Walter Reed

My grandpa is a chemical engineer who grew up in Cleveland and went to college at Purdue. He has many patents and has discovered many things during his time teaching at the University of Pittsburgh's chemical engineering department. Before teaching, he worked at a trend-setting company to develop techniques for making chemicals. My grandpa has changed the world of chemical engineering. One of the reasons that I want to be a mechanical engineer is because of him. I wanted to learn more about how he grew up and what parts of his childhood impacted him the most.

How did your parents impact you?

My dad was a reader. The single most important thing he taught me was the value of reading. Not specific topics, but general, broad reading, to understand different topics and perspectives. To this day, I almost always carry a book with me. My mom was very loving. She taught me work ethic and, more importantly, she gave me aspirational goals. From a very young age, I knew my goal was to go to college and study something that was not only of interest to me but also contributed to the world.

Who did you look up to?

I was your age in the early 60s. I was a child of the 1950s through 1960s. You had global heroes who are universally admired; people like John Glenn and Martin Luther King, who were doing some really brave things. But beyond them and my parents, I had one uncle who was a lot of fun. When I was younger, he was the guy who would build a hockey rink in his backyard in the middle of winter by putting the hose out there and letting it freeze. Or we would get into an argument and call the fire department to ask whether there's any carbon monoxide in their emergency air because it stimulates part of your brain. When I was 14 years old, his son, who went to Purdue, invited me to visit for a football game. After that experience, Purdue became my ambition school.

What childhood experiences shape you?

My younger childhood was in the 50s, so you spent a lot of time playing with neighborhood children. I had a lot of fun. I lived in a suburban neighborhood. I had half a dozen friends, and we would do things together, like play war. I lived on a street with about a square mile of undeveloped property behind it. When I got older, I would regularly come home, put on a pair of knee-high boots, and take a walk out into the woods. I never saw anybody else. It was just time to walk through the woods. It was especially fun when it was cold and snowy; you’d crunch through the ice, and there was water everywhere but you would go through forests and then suddenly you’d walk out into a meadow. The value of being alone was that I learned I didn't need to have people with me all the time.

What advice do you have for the future generation?

I am a chemical engineer, and I worked in big corporations for a good part of my life. About halfway through my career, I realized that I love technology. It was one of the best things that happened to me. Though I loved working with people, I didn't like managing people; you have to be judgmental. I thought there were people who could do that better than I could. Because I have a technical education, I was fortunate enough to be able to pursue that passion. I found my calling early, but it can take a while. What you think you're going to do as a youngster probably won't be what you end up doing as a professional, but that doesn't preclude it. It will change over time. 

The second thing is a piece of advice my grandmother gave me when we were sitting on a bench in Museum Park. We were watching people go by, and she told me, “Every one of those people has a story. If you just pause long enough to listen, you’ll be rewarded.” Listen to people and you'll find amazing things. 

Finally, keep the preservative ability to find wonder in the world. There are so many things that look negative, but there's so much more that's positive. Keeping that sense of wonder is so valuable. Even as a 70 year old I still try to preserve the wonder of simple things.

What would you say are the main differences between when you were little and now?

We did not have electronics. If you were playing games, you were playing board games. I always had a magazine rolled up in my back pocket so I could read during any downtime. The way we've integrated technology into our lives today is different, too. Technology today is so much more personalized. A potential negative of that is that your imagination isn’t as stimulated. When I was younger, if we were playing with a spaceship, we would make it out of boxes. Today, you might play in a spaceship at an amusement park, or Disney World, or a playground. The biggest difference is this intimacy with technology and its incorporation into your everyday life.

Why did you decide to become an engineer?

My father was a skilled machinist. He knew how to do a lot of things with his hands, whether it was working on cars, woodworking, installing gas lines. He instilled that in me. I like to tinker. I would take apart radios. I took apart a lot of TVs that then never worked again. I was fascinated by science of all sorts, but especially chemistry, probably from watching horror movies. I wanted to study chemistry in college, but what I discovered is that although I loved science and chemistry, I had no aptitude at all for languages – and to be a registered chemist, you needed to study German. No matter how much I tried, I couldn't get a good grade in German. I went to the chemistry department and said, do I really need to study German? They said, yes, you need to study German. I went to the biochemistry department. I said, do I need to study German? They said, not German, but you do need to study language; Spanish or French or something like that. So I went to the chemical engineering department. I said, do I need to study German? They said, no, you don't. I asked, do I need to study another language? The lady thought about it, and she said, you’ll need to learn a computer language. Immediately, I signed up. It turned out to be my passion. Even today, as a retired person, I'm still very active in the chemical engineering community. I love it. And so I found my calling at the ripe young age of 17 by failing in German.

Is there anything else you think is important to know?

I have met with people from just about any part of the world you can imagine. I met with them socially, I met with them professionally, and we made great things together. The world is a very small place all over every day. We're a global community. It’s important to acknowledge that, to realize that no matter where you are – whether you're walking through a street in China or Germany or Brazil – if look around, you’ll see that the people are doing exactly the same thing we're doing every day. They're making a living, they're taking care of their families, they're buying food and cooking food, they're playing games. The one thing that I think is absolutely critical to the future is to realize that we are a worldwide community.