Excerpt from the Spring 2026 Extension
While you were working at Wright State, you might’ve thought you knew a lot about your colleagues from daily interactions, participation in meetings and special events. But did you really know them—their early life experiences, education, and other training? We thought we’d share an excerpt from a December 2022 interview with former faculty member, Dr. Bud Baker from the Department of Management in the Raj Soin College of Business. Finding out about his path to WSU is worth the read!
Bud Baker: I grew in upstate New York in Rochester, which is a city very much like Dayton. And I had the good luck to be graduating in the midst of the Vietnam War. I had the bad luck to have a very, very low draft number, which meant that I was going to be drafted, and I thought that the Air Force sounded better than more slogging pursuits like the Army. So, I went in the Air Force. I was too blind to be a pilot. So, I become a navigator in cargo jets and spent a few years doing that through Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Kathy Morris: Where did you get the training for that?
Bud Baker: There’s only one school. There’s a number of pilot training bases for the Air Force, but there’s only one navigator base. And in those days it was Sacramento, California. So, I went there for a year and then went up to Tacoma, Washington, to those big cargo jets that I was referring to, and then from there out into the Pacific and basically as far as Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Thailand, Cambodia, places like that. And did that for a while, I then became a… eventually I was replaced by a machine that the addition of global positioning systems like inertial navigating systems meant that people who got airplanes around using the moon and the stars and the planets, which was what I did, were not very useful anymore.
So, they made me a strategic air command missile crew commander at a place called Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota. Did that, went out to California to a strategic air command headquarters and along the way I got introduced to a fellow who is probably the most famous man in the field of management. His name is Peter Drucker and he was my professor for three years at my doctoral program at the Claremont Graduate School.
While I was there, the professor I mentioned ran a group that had the general, the Air Force general, it was like, it was almost like a community group, they called it the “Monday Morning Group,” because they met on Fridays. Peter Drucker asked, “Do you have anybody that you would nominate for my PhD program?” The general came back and said, “Is anybody interested?” Everybody else went, “Nah”, I said “Hey, I’ll do it.” So, that’s how I wound up doing that, and then from there that led to the Air Force Academy working as a deputy department head in teaching management. And then at the end of four years at the Air Force Academy they came to me, and I had written my dissertation—and it kind of made me famous in the 15 minutes of fame thing —on a canceled Air Force program called “The Flying Wing.” There were a lot of allegations that the Northrop Corporation had gotten abused by the Air Force, and in particular, by the Secretary of the Air Force, that the Air Force had corruptly taken away Mr. Northrop’s design and his business. And I came stumbling into that looking for a dissertation topic and saying, “Gee, that sounds kind of interesting.”
So, you know it was going to be an ethics and government kind of study, and the next thing I knew, I was the world’s greatest expert on this airplane, because I knew a lot of the old Air Force people, people who are all gone now. The Secretary of the Air Force from those days, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, which was the number one military leader, a guy named Curtis LeMay. I knew all these guys, and so I was able to do this dissertation. So, I finished my time with the academy and I got a call, “Would you like to come to Dayton, Ohio?”, and I said, “Well, no, not really”, but that’s where I ended up. So, they said, “Where do you want to work?” Then they said, “We have a job for you if you want it,” and I said, “Well, what would I be doing?”, and they said, “We can’t tell you.” So, I said, “Who would I be working for?” and they said, “We can’t tell you that, either,” and I said, “Well, what does the job entail?”
Kathy Morris: We can’t tell you that, either.
Bud Baker: “We can’t tell you anything. Do you want the job or don’t you?” So, I said, “Sure, why not?” So, we came to Dayton.
Kathy Morris: Because you’re a risk taker.
Bud Baker: Yeah, you know, by then I figured I had nothing to lose. So, we came to Dayton, and I ended up going into what they call “the black world,” which was the secret world there, because that’s when the stealth bombers were being built. And the stealth bomber it turned out, although nobody knew this at the time, certainly I didn’t know it at the time, was building on the thing that I had become the world’s greatest expert on, the original Northrop flying wing. The stealth bomber was another flying wing, being built by Northrop 40 years later, and people reasoned probably not correctly—that I might have a leg up based on knowing something about the history.
Kathy Morris: So, did your dissertation end up getting passed around kind of like, like the novel, the story, not the true story. It was non-fiction, but it could have been a best seller.
Bud Baker: Well, that’s exactly what happened, and the reason that it happened that way was the Secretary had cleared—Mr. Northrop gave a deathbed interview where he said that the Secretary of the Air Force, a man who went on to be senator for 24 years, a man named Stuart Symington, that Stuart Symington was a crook, and that he had tried to force Northrop to do something corrupt, and when Northrop didn’t he canceled Northrop’s airplane, he being the Secretary of the Air Force. So, I ended this ice stumble, and I write to Symington and say, “Hey, this guy says that you’re a crook. What do you have to say?” Well, the next thing you know, I’m in trouble with everybody. The Air Force is mad at me because now this guy is a U.S. Senator and he’s screaming about me.
Kathy Morris: Powerful, right.
Bud Baker: It all got kind of evened out, it all got worked out. Again, I knew all these guys, so I was in a position to do the dissertation and the dissertation ended up cleared and signed with him. So, the reason it got passed around was that he had hundreds of copies of it printed up and distributed all throughout the aerospace business, and it got to many people. But the Commander at Wright-Patterson got a copy of it and then contacted me and said, “Would you like to come work here?” and I said, “Sure.”
Kathy Morris: That is a fabulous story, Bud.
