Aerospace Career, My

Kennedy Thank you so much for the history of North American Aviation (NAA) and its progeny. I read it with great interest and was able to identify with several of its milestones. We moved here from Massachusetts in the summer of 1957, arriving the very week that NAA’s Navaho was cancelled, and tens of thousands of layoffs were reported. I later read that essentially all of those laid off found employment almost immediately. I began work then at the Ramo Wooldridge Corporation (RW) in its Communications Division in its new Space Park, Redondo Beach, facility. They were hiring so fast that my desk was in a hallway for a month. Years later I learned we were doing electronic gear for the U2 spy plane. After less than 60 days on board, there was an all-hands (except managers, of course) 20percent layoff, which just barely omitted me! I didn’t tell my wife. We were searching for a house and hadn’t yet taken our furniture out of storage. About two months later the final blow came: the entire division was terminated! Luckily I was able to transfer into another RW group, which had just begun work on USAF’s Quail decoy missile, under a sizable subcontract to McDonnell Aircraft, St. Louis. That November 1957 RW merged with Thompson Products to form the Thompson Ramo Wooldridge (TRW) Corporation, at which time Drs. Ramo and Wooldridge, having invested $5,000 each, each became multi-millionaires overnight. TRW was organized in two groups: (1) Space Technology Labs, which had pivotal contracts on USAF’s massive ICBM program, and (2) the RW Division, which would opt for a variety of other military work. TRW’s RW Division soon moved into expansive, new buildings in Canoga Park, so my family and I moved there, literally across the street from the plant. I could sleep till seven and walk to work. From the beginning, RW faltered, showing heavy losses each quarter. After giant RW overruns, the Quail Program was cancelled. RW was soon given a corporate ultimatum to show a profit within six months or else. Or else happened. The entire RW Division was terminated, and I was out in the cold again. (Hughes immediately moved into those RW buildings in Canoga Park.) Reluctantly I joined TRW’s ICBM group in Inglewood, and we moved again, back to Gardena. I felt like just another number among several thousand engineers working on the DOD’s largest weapon system. For several years I worked on the Minuteman ICBM program, very slowly increasing my capabilities and responsibilities. With generous travel funding, I was able to do extensive travel, often visiting Boeing, the Minuteman prime contractor, Autonetics, who built the G&C subsystem, and Sylvania, who did the ground electronics. Then without warning in 1970 TRW made a deep, across-the-board Minuteman cut-back. After 13 years with TRW, I was laid off with three weeks notice and forbidden in writing to apply elsewhere within TRW! After six weeks out of work, having made more than 200 fruitless contacts, I joined Douglas Aircraft, Long Beach to work for Dave Gilles -- my only job offer!-with a five percent reduction in salary. That began more a quarter century of rewarding work at Douglas. Robert S. Babin 28 April 2002 /var/www/apps/pdfcoke/pdfcoke/tmp/scratch4/9049386.doc