by Van Mitchell, staff writer
Richard T. Russ has lived an adventurous life from being an airline pilot to aerospace engineer to entrepreneur and author.
Russ is the author of three books and 41 magazine articles.
His latest book “Life’s Adventures,” is about a young person that was an underachiever in high school that matured into a rocket system engineer in the launching of the historical Saturn V rocket that took Apollo 8thru Apollo 11 astronauts into outer space and enabled Apollo 11 astronauts to land on the moon.
Russ said his novel provides readers with continuing episodes that scholastically that some may have considered him as being a non-achiever to his careers that offered him the opportunity of becoming a history making engineer and entrepreneur.
“To be honest with you, every day’s been exciting because there’s always something going on,” Russ said, who lives in Oklahoma City.
Russ graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1962.
“In 1962, my goal was to fly for the airlines, and I had an offer to work in 1963 for Continental in Los Angeles as a flight engineer, and went to work for them,” he said.
Russ later took a job with North American Aviation Space and Information Systems Division, a NASA program.
“It was exciting because my job specifically was the stage pressurization and ground pneumatics, and I provided all of the pressurization for the Saturn and then, of course, the ground pneumatics to operate all the pneumatic systems,” he said.
Russ later received an opportunity to return to Oklahoma to work as a project engineer for Aero Commander in Oklahoma City.
“I talked to my wife and she, being from Oklahoma, she would like to come back, so we came back to Oklahoma,” he said. “I came here, and it was a great job here as a project engineer for Aero Commander.”
He later went back to California to work for North America Rockwell and later finished his aerospace career as the Senior Engineer on the Space Shuttle Enterprise Approach and Landing Test to later become a successful entrepreneur.
“We had a small aircraft company here at Wiley Post Airport,” he said. “I designed a door seal for general aviation and got that patented. We shut down the company after Covid, and then I started marketing that door seal. We had 140 different models that we certified with the FFA. At that point, a company came along out of Houston and said, ‘We want to buy your company.’ It was an offer that we could not turn down, and we could take care of ourselves for retirement, and so we sold the company.”
Russ then got into restoring older Jaguar vehicles, and his restoration work won several national judging contest awards.
His success with that caught the eye of Jaguar officials.
“My first book was at the request of Jaguar to write a book on the Series Three Jaguar E type,” Russ said. “They asked me if I would write a judge’s guide for them for competition, and so I said, ‘I’ll be glad to, and I did.’”
Russ’s inaugural publication, titled “Jaguar V12 E Type: A Guide to Authenticity,” aims to assist Jaguar E-Type sports car owners in restoring their vehicles to the prestigious standard of 100-point Concours d’Elegance winners.
Russ then followed up with his second book titled “They Call Me Tammie,” which is about the life of a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel to be enjoyed by both young and old.
“I wrote a small children’s book based on the day in the life of our dog Tammie through her eyes,” he said.
Russ said he does not have plans to write a third book.
“My wife has asked me not to. She said because it is so time-consuming when I was writing and she didn’t want that (again),” he said.
Russ is still busy with a variety of projects including helping design/fix model airplanes.
“There’s a model airplane with which I am helping. I got in my model airplane to shop over here (in house),” Russ said. “I’m so busy doing things and my days are always involved.”
Russ mentioned that he was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time when opportunities presented themselves.
“I’ve just been in the right places at the right time and doing things I wanted to do,” he said. “There are some things a lot of people just dream about doing and I’ve gotten to do them in my life.”
For more information about Russ’s books visit www.amazon.com.
