William Curtis Doyle
Jan. 19, 1929-Nov. 27, 2015
Palo Alto, California
William C. Doyle, a Palo Alto resident and former Lockheed vice president who innovated in the field of electronic warfare, passed away on Nov. 27 from lung cancer complications. He was 86.
Bill was born Jan. 19, 1929, in Utica, New York, and raised in the gritty small towns of Forestport, Vernon and Vernon Center. A fine baseball and basketball player, and a dedicated student, he won a Navy ROTC scholarship to study electrical engineering at Cornell University. The poor kid from the sticks survived the five-year grind and eventually thrived in college, serving as president of Delta Chi fraternity.
Equally important, one football weekend, Bill met on a blind date Joy Fairchild, a California native and Elmira College student who showed him the sunny side of life. They married Sept. 13, 1952, at the Navy chapel on Treasure Island, and their union endured over the next 63-plus years.
Following his 1952 graduation from Cornell, Bill served as an electronics officer aboard the USS Kula Gulf, an escort carrier patrolling the Atlantic Ocean, until his honorable discharge in 1955 as a lieutenant junior grade. He joined the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York, and earned an MSEE from the University of Buffalo.
Then, amid a snowy Upstate New York winter, California beckoned. In 1960, Bill joined Sylvania's Electronic Defense Laboratory and entered the spooky world of electronic reconnaissance. He moved in 1964 to Applied Technology Inc. (ATI). At ATI, he was intimately involved in developing airborne electronic countermeasures used with lethal effect in the Air Force's Wild Weasel program.
Bill worked at Litton Amecom before returning to ATI as a vice president. Studies at Harvard Business School in an executive's program preceded his being hired by Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. in 1979. There, he managed programs whose details were hidden in the federal government's "black" budget. Eventually, Bill was promoted to vice president in Lockheed's startup Austin division, where early efforts were made to develop a remotely piloted vehicle. Following his 1989 retirement from Lockheed, he worked for a Bay Area company called Physics International for 18 months before retiring for good.
A lifelong tinkerer, Bill had several patents, some of them classified. He wrote reports, also classified, whose public titles included phrases like "special warfare" and "submarine location." When he wasn't working behind locked doors, he expressed his inventiveness by making wine, building handy devices and crafting exquisite stained glass windows. He could fix anything, except maybe a car. He loved his family, dearly.
He is survived by his wife, Joy Doyle, of Palo Alto; daughter, Sharon Doyle of Burke, Virginia; son, Michael Doyle of Arlington, Virginia; and five grandchildren, Erin, Carson, Matthew, Brendan and Margaret.
Tags: veteran, business