This interview covers Terhune's life and career through 1978. Starting with his Detroit, Michigan youth, it goes on to his World War II Naval training, graduate school years at the University of Michigan, where he also directed work in computers, infrared componentry and ruby maser applications at the Willow Run Laboratories, and his subsequent career as a manager/physicist at Ford Motor Company, where he led a pioneering research group in non-linear optics. The tensions of working in a military-sponsored university laboratory are discussed, as are those that exist between research and management in a large auto company.