The committee made a detailed study of the two existing departments, They determined the advantages and disadvantages of a merger. For some of the faculty, it became an emotional issue, especially in the EL Department. Some of the EL faculty threatened to resign if a merger took place. However, the EE Department faculty seemed to favor a merger, or at least accept it with grace.
On August 3, 1971, President Kennedy made personal telephone calls to Drs. Owen and Horton, and Professors Anderson and Bowden, informing them that he would announce the merger of the two departments on August 4 by a memorandum to the faculty of each department and a press release.
President Kennedy's merger memorandum state in part. "I am taking this means of informing each of you that the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Departments will be administered as a single department beginning with the fall quarter, 1971. Dr. Evan R. Owen will be the department head and Dr. William Horton will be deputy head of the department.
Approximately a week later Dr. Owen called Professor Anderson, who was on vacation, asking him to come to his office for a discussion of some important matters. He requested Anderson to move from his office location in the EE wing of Engineering East where he had been since the occupancy of the building in 1957 to a space in the EL wing adjacent to his (Dr. Owen's office. He was asking him to serve as a sounding board and unofficial assistant department head. Since shared responsibilities were being proposed, the office move would promote convenience and efficiency.
No faculty resigned and the fears generated by the prophets of doom proved to be baseless. The energy which formerly had gone into competition was now directed toward the constructive progress of the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department. There were savings to the State through some faculty reduction (elimination of similar course duplication) and reduction in the number of classes required to service the students. The meager resources of the two departments were now combined and more efficient utilization has been the result. Change appropriate to the times usually is advantageous and this "maybe jarring" change in 1971 has proved to be no exception.
The new EL/EE Department went through ECPD accreditation in 1972 and the sincere and dedicated work of the combined faculties under Dr. Owen's leadership led to six-year accreditation. Dr. Owen took the first two weeks of September, 1975 as vacation time. The faculty traditionally met briefly at 8:00 a.m. on the first day of the new academic year. When Professor Anderson came in that morning, Carma Burns, department secretary, met him with the message that Dr. Owen had not returned from vacation and would be a few days late. Under a cloud of uncertainty, Professor Anderson opened the academic year. It was to be a year in which he would be serving as department head, sometime unofficially and sometimes as the official acting head.
In the spring of 1976, Dr. Owen requested to be relieved of the position of department head. In the fall of 1976, he was released from the suffering and painful torture of cancer of the bone marrow. Graduating with a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Northwestern University when he was eighteen years old, Dick Owen had joined the Navy. He was a member of the first American Service Personnel who had gone into Hiroshima in August, 1945, for first-hand inspection of the explosion of the first atomic bomb. Following the earning of his Ph.D. and several years employment with General Electric Company (often in atomic energy research) he had come from Florida to head the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department at Cal Poly. Although cut down in the prime of his life, Dr. Owen contributed significantly to the continued success and reputation of the EL/EE Department and to engineering education.