Donald Jesse Atwood Jr. (May 25, 1924 – April 24, 1994) was appointed Deputy Secretary of Defense for U.S. President George H. W. Bush in 1989. Atwood wrote the proposal and directed the organization that developed and built the Apollo guidance system. Early history The son of a grocer, Atwood was born May 25, 1924, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, North of Boston. He lived on a small farm adjoining the ancestral home of the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Life on a small farm gave him a fascination with things mechanical and an appreciation for hard work. His parents' ambitions were to provide for him the opportunities they did not have. Following high school, Atwood was sent to Worcester Academy, a one-year college preparatory school. There he became interested in things technical. Atwood attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with an interruption of service in Burma with the U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1943 to 1946. When he returned to MIT, Atwood married Sue Harian, a graduate of Tufts University, and completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering. He served as a research associate in MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory from 1948 to 1952. The head of the instrumentation lab was Dr. C. Stark Draper, the father of inertial guidance and navigation. Under Draper, Atwood contributed numerous patents to the science and became an expert in navigation and guidance electronics and systems engineering. Dynatrol Corporation In 1952, Atwood and an associate, Fred Best, founded Dynatrol Corporation, a research company that developed and built inertial navigation and guidance systems for ballistic missiles. Atwood served as vice-president and treasurer of Dynatrol from 1952 to 1959. In 1959 General Motors purchased the company, including 50 employees along with Atwood to obtain the valuable navigation and guidance system technology. General Motors Atwood was named associate director of the Boston Research and Development Laboratory of AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors (AC Delco) after the purchase. In 1961, Atwood was appointed director of engineering of Milwaukee operations of AC Spark Plug, a manufacturer of the Norden Bombsight and similar instruments during World War II. The Milwaukee operations of AC Spark Plug was made a separate division of General Motors as AC Electronics in the late 1960s, but as the space race wound down in the early 1970s, this division was merged with Delco Radio and the combined division was renamed Delco Electronics with headquarters