Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2973

Newspaper clipping from The Independent, includes a photo, “Spencer Heath, 85, scans ‘a page from history’ with ‘Paragon’ propeller pamphlet circa 1916. — Jim Cooper photo”

Thursday, April 6, 1961

 

 

 

 

‘YOU MUST DREAM‘

 

 

Spencer Heath, 85, is Peripatetic Wit

 

By JAMES L. COOPER

Independent Managing Editor

 

“If you want happiness, you must dream things that never were, and then have fun making them come true.”

 

 This is just one idea this week from Spencer Heath, 85 years young — a man who hasn’t stopped dreaming about things that never were. . That he has made many of those things “come true” is attested in such documents as the International Who’s Who.

 

 This famed inventor-lecturer-student-philosopher keeps a schedule that de­mands a youthful outlook and regard for life.

 

 Although visiting friends at 312 Halesworth St., Santa Ana, he has also managed to give a series of lectures in a seminar on “Economics and the Spiritual Life of Free Men” at Chapman College in Orange, the last of which is slated tonight.

 

 He finds time to commute back and forth to Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, where he is now in residence as a guest of Dr. Joe Platt, president, and keeps a busy schedule lecturing.

 

INVOLVED WITH LIFE

 

Most of all, he likes to be involved with the whole busi­ness of life every waking hour of every day — and that adds up to many 18-hour days!

 

 He refuses to be “dropped into” any category for the same reason he refused to grow old — his unlimited love of the world and everything within it.

 

 He developed the early “Paragon” propellers, which equipped 98 per cent of the World War I planes.

 

INVENTOR, LAWYER

 

As an attorney, he aided in design and patents on the first submarines, the watch making industry, the automo­tive industry.

 

 He walked with the early giants in aviation, was a member of the old Aero Club of America, was the first to predict in an interview in 1922 that this aviation field “is an industry.”

 

 Heath then promptly helped make it an industry in developing the variable pitch propeller, after which he sold the patents to Bendix Avia­tion.

 

 He took time out to aid Emile Berliner in his inven­tion of the telephone trans­mitter — to found a social science school in New York and teach there four years — to write a book “Citadel, Market and Altar.”

 

PERIPATETIC WIT

 

Whether he is at his 110-acre estate in Baltimore, Md., his apartment in New York, his “homes” in Santa Ana or in Claremont, he is a peripatetic wit, optimist, critic, real­ist, and dreamer.

 

 His advice to young men and women emerging from the universities all over the nation:

 

 “I would recommend young people have a good time understanding things. The best way to do that, is to give full reign to curiosity about everything.”

 

 With a twinkle in his eye, he added — “they should question things, learn things, and do things just for the hell of it.”

 

ON ‘SECURITY’

 

About the growing concern of this age — young and old —for security.

 

 “If you want security, if you want relief, you can go to the poor house. If you want happiness, you must dream things that never were, and then have fun making them come true.”

 

 Most startling is his belief that a new era in Western civilization is at its dawning.

 

 He believes it has to do with his conviction that pri­vate enterprise is equated with the Christian teachings, and with the golden rule.

 

“IN THE SHADOWS”

 

“We don’t understand our free enterprise enough to glory in it — we are stumbling in the shadows. Embodied within the golden rule, and Christian technology there is a miraculous spiritual vitality that awaits us.”

 

 He sees this new era in the form of real estate complexes to be privately owned, pri­vately controlled and pri­vately administered.

 

 Calling these new vast complexes “cities like hotels,” he believes they will eventually provide all serv­ices under private ownership, which are now under public control — and do it better.

 

 Heath explained that he believes western man can achieve his zenith only under a Christian climate of private enterprise to create wealth.

 

“A NEW ERA”

 

He believes the new era will have proprietary ad­ministrations as opposed to governmental rule.

 

 He believes federations of these developments will be developed to provide all the services, local and national, now provided by governments.

 

 This private control would develop man’s highest crea­tive potential, free of gov­ernmental control, he explains.

 

 “Only God and the God that’s in man can create,” he
says.

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