Still Playful After All These Years
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Staring out the open door of a moving airplane, “I was petrified. It was a long way down,” Elsie Mathews says. She had never been in an airplane before, but was about to leap into her first sky dive. It was a study break from her final exams.
Eric Knight, who was also trying out the sport, says watching Elsie make that jump “crystallized” his feelings about her. Now they dive under the ocean’s surface wearing scuba tanks to explore the world’s coral reefs. They are on “a perpetual journey,” which has included launching the first amateur spacecraft and running a marathon in 92-degree, humid weather in August.
“We travel a lot,” and in November 1989 they went to California for two weeks, “with no plan,” Eric says. “We ended up one morning in Reno.”
As they were checking out, they noticed among the many sightseeing brochures an ad: Get Married $29.95 at Starlight Chapel, including free parking.
“It was a little hole in the wall,” Elsie says. The receptionist was the witness and photographer as a justice of the peace married them, borrowing one of Elsie’s rings for Eric to give her as they exchanged wedding vows.
When they returned home they celebrated with a big party at Eric’s parents’ home in Hamden, and then at a second hoopla with their college friends at Elsie and Eric’s apartment.
Two years after their wedding, they were looking through the newspaper and saw a house for sale in town. “We made an offer that day, and we bought the house,” Eric says.
Spontaneity is a hallmark of their marriage. “I moved to Bristol-Myers Squibb the week we bought the house,” Elsie says.
When Eric came home one day from running around the nearby reservoir, he cut a huge circle out of a red, white and blue striped sheet, stapled it to his T-shirt neck and tail and ran down the street to see if it would balloon out behind him like a parachute. Elsie laughed but was not surprised. It was the dawn of Eric’s PARA-SHIRT, a wind-resistance training shirt. Made of parachute rip-stop nylon, the invention was selected by the U.S. Patent Office for an exhibit at Walt Disney World’s EPCOT Center, and landed Eric and Elsie on a limousine to Manhattan, where Eric appeared on the “Late Show with David Letterman” in 1997.
Eric contacted Ky Michaelson, who ran a sportswear company, about manufacturing the PARA-SHIRT, but Michaelson was also well known for his rocket-powered race vehicles. When he told Eric about his project to build and launch the world’s first civilian spacecraft, Eric signed on.
“If you can’t beat them, join them,” says Elsie, who learned to work the milling machines while Eric helped to develop antenna for the spacecraft.
From 1999 to 2004, Elsie and Eric spent their energy, money and vacations in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert constructing and testing the spacecraft, while being blasted raw by sandstorms. “For years we’d try and go out and launch the rocket, and it would blow up. … We’d cry. … It became an obsession. It was too much stress on too many people,” Eric says of the 26-member team.
“We were so relieved and so thrilled,” when the ship flew in 2004, beating corporations and amateurs around the world in “The New Race to Space,” which is also the title of the book about the project that Eric wrote, highlighted by Elsie’s photographs. (View the rocket launch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqI3h3ZQhjo)
Eric has been an inventor since he was a kid. At age 12, melted lead fishing sinkers to fill a baseball so he could use it to build a stronger throwing arm. Mission accomplished: He moved up to his dream position as center fielder in Little League. He also flew model airplanes with his cousins, and still has recordings of many of the early NASA liftoffs.
He and Elsie first met in 1979 at the start of Elsie’s freshman year at the University of Connecticut. She lived a floor above Eric in what was a notorious campus housing area called The Jungle. When Elsie’s roommate introduced them, “It was love at first sight,” Eric says.
“For both of us. It was amazing,” Elsie says.
Their first date was in the ancient cemetery behind the dorm attending a reading of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” “He was quiet,” Elsie says, but, “I learned differently.”
Switching majors from electrical engineering to communications science, Eric graduated in December 1982 and began working as a copywriter at a small advertising agency in Waterbury.
Elsie graduated in May 1983 and went to Yale to work in diabetes research on mice.
A year later, she moved to Farmington as the first employee of a start-up biotech firm.
Eric also moved to Farmington to work at Mintz + Hoke advertising agency. He advanced to associate creative director and vice president before he left in 1997 to focus on his own entrepreneurial businesses.
“I like adventures,” says Eric, who had already started a web interactive agency and Remarkable Technologies Inc. to market his inventions.
His current projects include a device worn over the head, which evolved from antenna technology developed for the spacecraft, to provide electromagnetic treatment to the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. his spring, Eric licensed his device to NeuroEM Therapeutics in Phoenix, Ariz., for future use in clinical patient trials. He also is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence two days a week with Hartford reSET, a non-profit that works with entrepreneurs, where, he says, “There is an economy that is rapidly flourishing. … We just need to nurture it.”
Eric is “passionate about what he does. … He’s very enthusiastic about everything,” Elsie says.
While Eric’s career path has been “non-linear,” Elsie is now marking her 25th year at Bristol-Myers Squibb, where she started doing cardiovascular research but has moved on to infectious disease, anti-virals, neurosciences and immuno-oncology clinical trials. “Part of the deal,” when Eric started his business, was that “I have the stable, corporate job,” Elsie says. She is now the director of eClinical Operations and has traveled from India to Belgium to Washington, D.C., for her work. While in India, she spoke about the work of Altrusa International, which promotes literacy by providing new and gently-used books to children worldwide. Elsie is President of the Central Connecticut chapter.
Growing up in Mystic, Elsie never lost her early love of the water, and she convinced Eric to learn scuba diving with her. Eric, who has been running marathons since the 1980s, won Elsie over to running her first marathon with him two years ago. It was “a challenge,” and similar to scuba. “You’re in your own space,” Elsie says.
Elsie also played shortstop on her high school softball team, and they both have their own engraved baseball bats from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. They have been to 20 of the 30 major baseball parks in the country in their quest to visit them all.
It was Elsie’s first sky dive, however, that branded her forever as “a very special lady,” in Eric’s mind. Elsie is “amazingly passionate about what she does for a living,” he says. Yet, “We haven’t lost our love of play. We’re two dedicated people who like to have fun. That’s why we’ve become life partners.”
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