"It was the surprise of my life," said Whitfield, ME '32, MS ME '34, who lives with his wife, Shirley, at Canterbury Court, an Episcopal retirement complex in Atlanta. He is president of the residents.
The selection came as no surprise to anyone else. Whitfield's business career, community accomplishments and service to Georgia Tech are marked by distinction.
Whitfield will be recognized at graduation exercises June 10 at Bobby Dodd stadium. The occasion will also mark the graduation of a grandson, Randolph Whitfield McDow, a President's Scholar and co-op student, who is receiving an industrial engineering degree.
After earning his master's degree in mechanical engineering, Whitfield began a 40-year career with the Georgia Power Co. He retired in 1974.
A former member of the Georgia Tech Alumni Association board of trustees, Whitfield has contributed to the annual Roll Call for the past 48 years and is a past president of the Atlanta Georgia Tech Club. He took part in the founding of the Joint Tech-Georgia Development Fund, and the group's top volunteer award is named in his honor.
When graduating from Tech with honors, Whitfield was class president, an office which has unofficially stuck with him during the intervening years. He has served as chairman of reunion class committees over the years and as a chairman of fund-raising committees. At its 50th reunion, the class presented Whitfield with a unique gold watch_instead of numerals, the watch face reads R-W-H-I-T-F-I-E-L-D.
"That has meant more than anything else at Tech, because it came from my classmates," Whitfield said.
It is the second watch that he has received in recognition of his service to Georgia Tech. The first came in 1962 from legendary football Coach Bobby Dodd for 35 years of service to the Athletic Association. He is listed in Who's Who of Engineering and has been elected to the Georgia Tech Engineering Hall of Fame.
A member of the American Nuclear Society, Whitfield said nuclear power still offers the promise of clean and efficient energy. And as an environmentalist, Whitfield is one of the founders of the Georgia Conservancy and a past trustee. "Most of our resources are not renewable, and we must protect our environment from damage for the sake of our descendants--our children and grandchildren. It would be tragic to turn over an uninhabitable world to those who follow us, " he said.
Whitfield also served on the environmental committee of the Chamber of Commerce. He is a past trustee of both the Multiple Sclerosis Society and the Lovett School, where his wife once taught.
In 1952, Whitfield, a sailing enthusiasts, was named commodore of the Atlanta Yacht Club at Lake Allatoona. It was during his term that the club grew into the largest inland sailing club in the South. "Atlanta attracts people from all over, and there were a lot of land-locked sailors eager to get to water," Whitfield said. "We had a very rapid increase in the number of sailboats."
As a boy, Whitfield wanted to be an engineer. But it was the co-op program that attracted him to Georgia Tech. "I felt that was the best way to get an education," he said.
A son of Florida Supreme Court Justice James Bryan Whitfield, he said he was motivated to pay his way through school because he had chosen not to follow his father's footsteps and pursue a law career. "I sort of disappointed him in that respect," Whitfield explained. "He would have gladly paid my way, but he was proud that I wanted to do it."
As a freshman co-op student, Whitfield's first job was with a foundry and machine company about a mile from campus. The year was 1927, and Whitfield's salary of 20 cents an hour was low even then. "Back then, you went to school a month and then you worked a month; it was a terrible system," Whitfield said. "You hardly got acclimated to your books before you were rooted out and had to go to work."
Whitfield usually walked to work, but it was common for co-op students who had to travel any distance to "thumb" rides to work.
During his sophomore year, Whitfield began work for a cottonseed-oil firm, but he soon found a job as an assembly worker for the Ford factory in a four-story building on Ponce de Leon Avenue. "I either got $1 dollar an hour or $5 a day," Whitfield said. "It was a big increase in pay."
It was also during his sophomore year that Whitfield became a campus celebrity. Tech was playing California in the 1928 Rose Bowl and four buses of fans, alumni and students were making the trip across the continent to see the game. Whitfield approached the Atlanta Journal newspaper and was hired to file daily accounts of the group's progress. "We got stuck in the mud in south Alabama the first day out," Whitfield recalled. "We fell behind and decided we had to drive day and night. I hired on for the night shift. I drove a bus every night, and in the daytime I wired in a story to the Atlanta Journal. They gave me a byline and one story was on the front page." The group saw Tech win (8-7) a game made famous by a wrong-way run by California's Roy Riegels.
Later, Whitfield was laid off by the Ford plant and promptly got a job at the Chevrolet Assembly Plant near the federal penitentiary. "They had a base pay, but above that, the union allowed you to get paid based on production," Whitfield said. "It was a wonderful system. Everybody was trying to help everybody else get those cars off the line. The labor union later prohibited that, but at the time everybody was happy."
Whitfield worked his way up to final inspector, and that is when he ran into a problem. "I'm colorblind," Whitfield said. "In those days, wheels were painted to match the color of the car. One day the head of the plant came out there all steamed up. He said, 'We're shipping some cars out of here with different colored wheels! How could it happen?' I made myself real scarce. I got one of the other employees, a fellow on the line, to watch for off-color wheels."
During his junior year, Whitfield began courting Shirley McPhaul, a student at Agnes Scott College. Whitfield was a co-op student when she graduated, and still had a year to go. "I wanted to wait until I graduated," Whitfield said. "She said, 'Fine, but I won't wear your engagement ring that long.' I married her." They have been married for 64 years.
When he and his bride returned from a honeymoon in Bermuda, Whitfield learned that he and one-third of the workers at the plant had been laid off.
"I didn't let Shirley know. I left home about 6 o'clock--in those days factories started work real early--and I pounded the streets for a job." He was hired as a salesman by fellow Tech alumnus Hal Smith, Com '26, who owned Whitehall Chevrolet. Shirley, who later became a college professor, began teaching at the Lovett school.
"I hated sales work, but it worked out real well," Whitfield said. "I could tell the customer that I had been building those cars for four years and I knew personally how good they were. I won an award from the national sales manager for the number of cars that I sold."
After graduation, Whitfield taught mechanical engineering at Tech while pursuing his master's degree.
During the summer of 1933, Whitfield and his wife invited three new Georgia Tech graduates--Herb Haley, ME '33; James "Peachtree" Tanner, EE '33; and Herb Williams Jr., EE '33--to accompany them on a trip to Europe. Whitfield called it "An Engineering Tour of Europe."
Traveling by ship, they took a car with them. "We had a great time. Herb Haley took a movie camera, and I had a still camera. We visited a number of the most prominent manufacturing places in England and the continent, particularly in Germany."
The Nazi party was taking power in Germany, and the day before the Whitfield party was to leave, the government announced that no information of a technical nature would be permitted to leave the country. Whitfield said they trashed all of the handout information they had accumulated. Then they let the air out of the spare tire, took the film, placed it between the tube and casing, and refilled the tire with air. "We got out of the country without getting caught, and I was able to make my engineering report and get credit for it."
The Whitfields have three children, Dr. Randolph Whitfield Jr., an ophthalmologist and a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius award," who has practiced medicine in Kenya for 23 years; Clare Whitfield, with Georgia Public Television, who was married to Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart; and Mary Croom, wife of retired aircraft carrier Capt. Asbury Coward IV. They have 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Whitfield said they have traveled to Africa about 10 times to visit his son, who has been a consultant to a dozen African countries.
The Alumni Distinguished Service Award, the highest award conferred by the institute on an alumnus, is named for the late Dr. Joseph M. Pettit in honor of his accomplishments as president of Georgia Tech from 1972 to 1986.