Warfield was awarded the Joseph G. Wohl Award at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society in Taipei, Taiwan. The IEEE Award IS $2000.00 and a plaque. The Award is described on the web site of the IEEE SMC Society. It is the highest award offered by this Society. Rather than travel to Taiwan to give his acceptance speech, Warfield asked if he might send a video recording instead, due to his advanced age. This was satisfactory. Warfield got his nephew Mike Boston to do the filming and produced a ten minute DVD a talk with 8 PowerPoint slides. The DVD disk was sent to the SMC awards chairman, who took it with him to Taiwan. The PowerPoint slides and a scanned photo of the plaque are also in the same folder. There are also 8 or more slides in this folder, copies of these had been given to Mike to cut and paste into the filmstrip. The film is not the greatest. It was done 4 September 2006 at Mike's church, using church camera and equipment which Warfield rented, after finding to his chagrin that Sheffield Alabama had no such thing as a professional video recording studio. Mike had equipment problems (the minister had misplaced the microphone, the lights wouldn't turn on properly, the camera angle was too far away and not head on full face as it should have been, there was no way for Warfield to intersperse the slides himself as he talked, so Mike had to cut and paste them later) but finally after Warfield had given the prepared speech three times on camera it seemed Mike got everything working right. Unfortunately by the time Warfield had run through the speech three times his delivery had become a little dispirited and mechanical. Warfield remained calm throughout the equipment flubs, but on the final filming he left out most of the spontaneous and charismatic comments which he had put into the first delivery, and also forgot to mention his important 1955 paper, which he had talked about on the first filming. I guess he realized by the third time around that the filming was hopeless. The folks in Taiwan probably won't know the difference since after all Warfield was now 80 years old, but I know John Warfield can be a lot more winsome and vital in front of a camera than he appears to be in this DVD.

The $2000 prize money and the plaque did not arrive right away. I think it was the year 2007 before they were delivered to Warfield at our Sheffield Alabama address. We hung the plaque on the wall with all the others. Warfield put the money in the bank, checked up on the tax situation and found that such awards are taxable, so it meant more bookkeeping chores for him since he always does all his own taxes and keeping records for the tax payments has become an increasing burden every year as little time-consuming rules and regulations are added to the tax code. In spite of such drawbacks, John was grateful and pleased to get the recognition. He was quite surprised that they gave him the award. He had not been active in SMC for a long time. He had no idea who proposed it or how it came about.

As I sit and watch this short video months later, I realize Warfield was trying to bring the IEEE SMC back to an earlier vision which he considered superior, that of extending the domain of systems concepts to a broad humanistic outlook on engineering problems. He was deeply disappointed in the evolution of SMC under Andy Sage's leadership into the trap of "highly mathematical tendencies" which the society leaders espouse today. Secondly he wanted to remind the membership that (Andy Sage notwithstanding) systems engineering really did not start with the current society leadership and Andy Sage's book on systems. Rather the society had its roots in the work of men whom the society now ignores, powerhouses such as Harold Chestnut, Arthur Hall.

Nephew Mike dressed up Warfield's PowerPoint slides with fancy backgrounds so they are difficult to read, and also allowed the slides so few seconds onscreen that you can't read the words. This tended to obscure the citations for Warfield's early papers on Systems Engineering, in 1955 and 1957, so I give them here. The earliest was "Systems Engineering" jn Serial # Nord 7958-307, Penn State Univ., Ordinance Research Laboratory, August 10, 1955. Reprinted U.S. Dept Commerce, NTIS, as PB111801, 1956. 24p. Two years later, in 1957, Warfield published "How to Improve Systems Engineering" in Aeronautical Engineering Review, v. 16 No. 7, July 1957. pp. 50-51 r.w. circa 2008.

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