Up Front

In Memoriam

Richard Mandel
Senior Editor

Last Labor Day weekend, the missus and I flew to Los Angeles, land of our birth, for the funeral of my mother-in-law. A good and noble woman, the last of five siblings, she had lived into her nineties, always trying to bridge between her Eastern European small town roots and the pace of 20th century America. I have many fond memories of her, but she is not the subject of this tribute.

Rather than returning to Cleveland by way of Los Angeles International Airport, we had arranged exit out of Burbank. On approach to the terminal, I discovered that every building that once comprised Lockheed Aircraft Company had been leveled. I worked for the company from '78 to '89, first in a pattern-making shop then joining an electronics apprenticeship program offered by the company. My remaining years there were as a journeyman avionics technician, working with various aircraft projects and R&D labs. Nor was I the only member of my immediate family that worked for the "Lazy L Dude Ranch"--my brother was a specialist in Human Resources for a few years, and our father was an electronics tech for more than 30 years, until he retired.

But interesting and downright fun as the work could be, I won't fill this page with personal nostalgia at your expense. I want to point out that this facility, which once covered as much acreage as many universities, was a place of great industrial history. This is where Bob Gross and his brother Courtland established the company after buying it from the Loughead brothers. Here planes were built for legendary aviators like Amelia Earheart and Wiley Post, and tested by ace pilots like Tony Vlier. During WWII, the facility built and flew hundreds of P38s, with strings of new aircraft making first flight each day. This was the site from which sprang the Vega, the Constellation and the Electra, the F80, the F104 and the P3 Orion (the latter was my primary assignment). And this was the original home of the legendary Skunk Works, birthplace of the U2, the SR71, the F117 and many other "black" projects, and where Master Engineer Kelly Johnson held court. Now all gone, gone, gone.

Of course, today the company is a mighty hyphenate, with memories stored as electronic data files and silver oxides on plastic film. You can't make an industrial site into a historical monument--certainly not with the exotic chemical stew bubbling 'neath the soil there. But watching a machine atop the piles of building rubble on that day, chewing blocks of concrete into powder like some post-industrial carrion-eater, made me reflect that, like legendary Camelot, there was this place and time where amazing deeds occurred.

rmandel@aip.com