But for Russell Colley of Springfield, he is simply “Wiley,” the pilot whose quest for a full-pressure flying suit secured Colley’s own fame as “the father of the space suit.” Colley earned 65 patents and pending patents during his 35-year career as an engineer and inventor for the B.F. Goodrich Co. in Akron. He also developed the “de-icer” used to keep ice off aircraft wings and led the top-secret design team that created the space suits for the Mercury astronauts.

Last week, he won NASA’s Distinguished Public Service medal, its highest honor for civilians.

Colley, 96, was awarded the medal in a special ceremony at the Ohio Masonic Home, where he has lived for two years. NASA Deputy Director J. Stuart Fordyce said Colley’s contributions are “so incredibly important and longstanding that they cry out for recognition.”

Colley is wheelchair-bound by arthritis, but his memories soar of his pioneering years in aviation. And his wit still crackles.

In high school, he dreamed of being a fashion designer. “You can’t do that,” a teacher admonished him, and steered him to a mechanical drawing class. There he discovered the hunger for solving problems that he satisfied so inventively at Goodrich, where he worked from 1928 until his retirement in 1962.

His first invention for Goodrich was a machine that propelled a golf ball 300 yards with the push of a button. “After that, I never bothered to play golf,” he says with a chuckle. “Doing it by hand seemed stupid.”

In 1932, Colley was a passenger on the test flight for the first plane equipped with de-icers. Since the Douglas biplane had only one seat, he sat on an orange crate in the mail compartment.

“It was a day when even the ducks were walking; nobody else was stupid enough to be up in the air,” he recalls. “We were set to fly from Cleveland to Buffalo, but we had to come down because of ice on the propellers.

“We got the ice off the wires and went back into the storm. The de-icers worked perfectly.”

A 1934 letter to Goodrich from Post posed Colley his next conundrum. Post requested “a rubber suit which will enable me to operate and live in an atmosphere of approximately 12 pounds absolute. I expect to fly through rarefied areas where the pressure is as low as 5 pounds absolute.”

Modeling his design after the tire and the inner tube, Colley succeeded on his third attempt. He made his suit with two layers with a large neck opening for easy entry. The outer layer was divided into two metal forms for the upper and lower torso. These were dipped into a liquid latex mixture and melded into a seated position.

Every night, Colley went home to sew the suit on his wife Dorothy’s sewing machine, and Post tagged along to provide precise measurements.

In Akron, the great adventurer amused himself by playing cards with Colley’s daughter, Barbara, 10.

In “teaching” Barbara to shoot craps, Post found himself $60,000 in debt to the child.

“Wiley wrote her an IOU for $60,000,” Colley recalls. “The next day he told her, ‘That’s 60,000 kisses.’

“She has been offered a lot of money for that signature, but she wouldn’t think of parting with it.”

U.S. Sen. John Glenn, who nominated Colley for the service award, was another famous customer.

For his historic around-the-Earth orbit, Glenn insisted on gloves with minuscule lightbulbs in the first three fingers of the right hand that would enable him to operate the capsule if all power failed. Colley devised a switch and a battery in the back of the glove and installed lightbulbs the size of a grain of wheat.

In a letter read at the ceremony, Glenn, D-Ohio, repaid the favor, praising Colley for his “substantial contributions to the nation’s military strength” and for expanding “the horizons in space research.”

Colley’s wife died in 1988, but his daughter, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were on hand.

Pretty heady stuff for a kid who started out making model airplanes and “never dreamed of a career in aviation” – and who still downplays his ingenuity and role as a pioneer.

“I was lucky to be working in the experimental division at Goodrich and to be given these assignments,” he says. “You just did the things they asked you to do.”