After the German surrender, the _Ark_ had been ordered home, and I had been assigned to the Naval Training Station, Great Lakes, Illinois, as Officer in Charge, Aviation Mechanics Schools. Here again I was to encounter Dr. Lucke and Capt. William Adger Moffett. During the war, Captain Moffett had commanded the training station and used it to show the Navy’s colors to the Middle West. One of those rare personalities, a naval officer with a flair for public relations, he had made many friends on the North Shore, but after the Armistice, was sent to the Pacific in command of the _Mississippi_, one of the few battleships with an airplane catapult aboard. Dr. Lucke had offered his services to the Navy upon the outbreak of the war and had established a chain of aviation mechanics schools, operated on the new principle of line production in education. One of these had been located at Great Lakes and, at the end of the war, Captain Moffett had succeeded in consolidating them all there. When, after the Armistice, Dr. Lucke had sought a regular officer as his relief, he had recommended me to the Navy Department. I had accepted the appointment with enthusiasm because the station was near my wife’s former home in Joliet. After we had been there on duty a year or so, Captain Moffett had returned for a visit with his friends and had surprised me one morning by calling on me in my office. He had completed his tour of duty at sea and was headed for Washington on a new project. As Captain of the _Mississippi_, he had been hampered in his catapult work by the lack of direction in Washington. Aviation activities were scattered all over the Department: engines in the Bureau of Engineering; airplanes in the Bureau of Construction and Repair; guns in the Bureau of Ordnance; and Operations in a branch of the Office of Naval Operations. Moffett had decided to go before Congress with a proposal to create a new Bureau of Aeronautics in the Navy Department and expected to be made its first Chief. And that morning at Great Lakes he had asked me point-blank if I would accept duty in his new bureau in charge of the Engine Section. I had first shied away from the idea, but he brushed my objection aside. He would have me ordered to sea duty in aviation, he said, and then bring me ashore to his bureau. Accordingly, in 1921 I was ordered to New York to put the seaplane tender and kite-balloon ship _Wright_ into commission, with duty as Chief Engineer, a job which had turned out to be that of wet nurse for a lot of dizzy, heavier-than-air and lighter-than-air pilots. As a “Kiwi,” the current name for a nonflying officer, I had found my young charges willing to concede me all the responsibilities of the organization, provided no one interfered with their authorities.