The Webb Alumni Association is pleased to present the forty-second William Selkirk Owen Award to Norman A. Hamlin ’44B. Unfortunately, Norman passed away suddenly on October 29, and with deep regret, the Association made the award posthumously.

Upon his graduation from Webb Institute of Naval Architecture in 1944B, Norm was commissioned as an Ensign in the US Naval Reserve and assigned to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. He served as a Ship Superintendent where he managed the overhaul of carriers, destroyers, and transports through 1946. He then went on to work for the Navy as a naval architect at the David Taylor Model Basin and pursued graduate studies in mathematics at Georgetown University. In 1948 Norm took a position with Bethlehem Shipbuilding Division’s Central Technical Department in Quincy, Massachusetts where he worked on a variety of commercial and naval ship designs, including the largest tanker built at that time, the S.S. MANHATTAN, the first commercial ship to cross the Northwest Passage. While at Bethlehem, he became head of the Hull Performance and Trials Section and Hull Performance Analysis and Hydrodynamics Section.

During this time, Norm pursued his Master of Science degree in Naval Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a SNAME Scholarship. He earned the degree in 1951.

It was in 1964 that he began his teaching career at Webb Institute of Naval Architecture as Research Associate and then Research Professor of Naval Architecture in our Center for Maritime Studies and then as a full Professor of Naval Architecture in 1972. From 1966 to 1975, he was also a Special Lecturer and then Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Department of Marine Science at Long Island University. After many years of faithful service to Webb, he retired in 1987 to Maine.

Norm continued to serve Webb as a Class Agent until his death and he was a member of the Heritage Society, a Life Member of the Alumni Association, and a loyal contributor to the Annual Alumni Fund.

His professional interests included his ongoing involvement with SNAME in New England and New York, where he was a frequent technical discusser of presented papers. Norm authored and co-authored numerous papers for SNAME, MARAD, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Ship Structures Committee, and for other publications and forums through the years. He authored Chapter I, “Ship Geometry”, in the 1988 edition of Principles of Naval Architecture. In addition to being a life member of SNAME, he was a past member of the Society of the Sigma Psi and the American Society for Engineering Education and was a registered PE in the State of Massachusetts. Norman was active up to his death as the President and Managing Director of the Thompson Ice House Preservation Corporation in South Bristol, Maine. Another hobby of his was sailing his C&C 21 Blue Skies.

Norm lived in Brunswick and S. Bristol, Maine with his wife, Barbara, and leaves behind three children and five grandchildren.

The following distinguished alumni have received this honor, which was established in 1964 and presented for the first time in 1966: