Education: Purdue's Rocket Man

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After six months of sifting through 150 candidates, Purdue University last week picked the nation's expert of experts on rocket bombs as its new president.

Hustling, 37-year-old Frederick L. Hovde first caught Purdue's eye as the slight (155 Ibs.), swift Minnesota quarterback who slid through the holes made by grid-great Bronko Nagurski, to become the Big Ten's top scorer in 1928. He went on to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, became the third American ever to make the Rugby varsity. There he caught the eye of Alan Valentine, his predecessor as U.S. man on the Oxford varsity. Hovde went back to the University of Minnesota, joined its faculty. After Valentine became president of the University of Rochester in 1935, he made Hovde his righthand man—with time to continue work on his specialty: chemical engineering.

He was so good at it that President Roosevelt sent him to London during the blitz. He was one of only four Americans to be entrusted with all U.S.-British technical secrets (the others: famed scientists Vannevar Bush, Karl T. Compton, James Bryant Conant). When the Nazis buzzed over their V-1 and V2, Hovde was drafted to devise countermeasures. He has since supervised the entire U.S. rocket-development program.

A good-natured, beer-drinking, chainsmoking, bridge-playing educator, Frederick Hovde is no research recluse. Hovde insists that all would-be scientists ground themselves solidly in the liberal arts.