INHABITING A FUTURE LONG SINCE PAST

by D. J. Waldie

I come from Lakewood—a place that was made to fabricate the future—but it’s a future now past. This is not to say that my aerospace suburb has no future. Only that it’s not the future for which Lakewood was made in 1950. My suburb sold itself into existence as “The City of Tomorrow, Today” at the beginning—or one beginning—of a new age in Los Angeles. Lakewood has seen the end of that age, or one of its ends, in the waning of the aerospace industry.

What will be the meaning of that optimistic and terrifying age of rockets, atom bombs, and supersonic flight? What lingering impression did the Age of Aerospace make on our imaginations and on our landscape?

In 1959, Lakewood received a novel piece of playground equipment—a Douglas F3D Skynight fighter—for a space-age themed park that also featured climbing structures in the form of a rocket and a flying saucer. The jet was so popular, one resident recalled, that “you had to fight for the cockpit. In other city parks, there was nothing like it. It was very much a flight of fancy.” City of Lakewood historical collection.

The assembly buildings where the future had been fabricated—in the form of Douglas airliners—stood not far from where I live. Most of those buildings are gone now. The rest will follow in three or four years when production of the Boeing C-17 military transport ceases. The construction of 1,400 residential units has already begun on the former Douglas site; more will follow.

Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach had employed 50,000 workers during World War II and more than 100,000 at the height of the Cold War, making it one of the largest manufacturing facilities in the nation’s history. Through the 1960s to the end of the Vietnam War, aerospace manufacturing in Los Angeles County employed about 500,000 workers—or 43 percent of the county’s industrial workforce. Today, in all of Los Angeles County, only 38,000 workers are employed in aerospace manufacturing; perhaps 70,000 more work in related industries in the region.

At the inception of the Aerospace Age—in the midst of World War II, in fact—the image of the new workforce that would build the future was being fabricated in Southern California. That image was Chester A. Riley, the earnest and hapless hero of The Life of Riley, a long-running series that began on a radio program hosted by Groucho Marx, spawned a popular motion picture in 1949, and became one of television’s most successful situation comedies between 1953 and 1958.

William Bendix was cast as Riley, a riveter at a California aircraft plant. His exclamation of impotent indignation—“What a revoltin’ development this is!”—became one of the best-known catchphrases of the period. The early radio segments were called, with the blackest of Groucho Marxist irony, “The Flotsam Family.” Essentially a big-hearted lug, Chester Riley was defense industry flotsam, already adrift in the first days of the Age of Aerospace along with his nuclear family in a landscape of small houses on small lots that was meant to be Hawthorne or Lawndale or Torrance.

Riley was the prototype for later blue-collar protagonists like Ralph Kramden, Fred Flintstone, and Archie Bunker. Today, with even more irony, Riley’s successor as the model technology worker is yellow, two-dimensional Homer Simpson, who works at a nuclear power plant.

A lot of my neighbors worked at the big Douglas plant on Lakewood’s southern edge. In the unlikely event any of them thought they were representative of some “greatest generation,” they had only to look to Riley to see what much of America thought. But Chester lacked one defining characteristic of my neighbors. William Bendix was a wonderful character actor, but when he opened his mouth, it was Brooklyn that spoke. Riley, to be true to life, should have spoken with the drawls and twangs of Oklahoma, west Texas, and Missouri.

By 1945, an estimated 600,000 Southerners had moved here to work in aircraft factories—many of them were like Steinbeck’s Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath, completing a migration from the Dust Bowl to the suburbs by way of the orchards of the Central Valley and the oil camps of Bakersfield. Wartime columnist Ernie Pyle called them “Aviation Okies.”

Well below the level of guys with slide rules, among the lugs in khaki with maybe a high school education, these “Aviation Okies” gave Los Angeles aerospace a distinctive, southern-inflected culture with its own style of country-western music, its own language, food preferences, and gathering places, as well as its own politics, class resentments, and racial antagonisms.

I grew up among “Aviation Okies” and their sons and daughters and saw them whipsawed by cycles of boom and bust in defense contracts and aircraft orders. I listened to their complaints about Douglas—an organization that seemed to be composed of dense layers of managers with a disturbing inability to manage the future. In Lakewood, aerospace gave us a precarious everyday life, and periodically aerospace took it away.

I watched The Life of Riley on Friday nights, when I was a boy, on a big, black-and-white RCA TV set in the side room of my Lakewood home. I watched the Disneyland series on Wednesday nights. In 1955, Disney’s “Man in Space” and “Man and the Moon” episodes, and later “Mars and Beyond,” presented cartoon images of the multistage rockets that would, thanks to armies of scientists and technicians, take boys like me to the moon and then to colonies on Mars.

When a real rocket scientist appeared among the cartoon figures, he was a smiling, earnest man, a little like Chester Riley in body type, with an accent, too, a German accent: Wernher von Braun. Von Braun, in his various roles as an affable seller of space flight, as a thoughtful counselor to presidents, and as the master rocketeer, appeared utterly unlike the “Aviation Okies” whom I knew, except in one way: von Braun’s adoption of a protective, born-again southern-ness when he had found a home, far from Peenemünde, Germany, in Huntsville, Ala.

Perhaps that was a further example of space-age fabrication. Later, I learned that the Rileys weren’t the only “flotsam family” adrift in the immediate postwar world. Von Braun’s family of engineers and technicians who had designed and built the V-2 rockets that fell on London, Amsterdam, and Antwerp had been cast adrift as well.

The von Braun family included men like Dieter Huzel and fellow engineer Bernhard Tessmann. They had successfully stashed 14 tons of plans, reports, and rocket parts in a disused iron mine in Germany’s Harz Mountains while von Braun zigzagged through the collapsing Reich. The plans were stashed in early April 1945. On May 2, the von Braun rocket team finally made contact with elements of the U.S. 44th Division. By February 1946, von Braun and the V-2 engineers reached the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. By January 1947, Huzel was working at Fort Bliss, Texas, and a little later at North American Aviation, providing a key link in the transfer of German rocket engine technology to what would become Rocketdyne.

Huzel was another image of the model aerospace worker, a competent, disciplined man just like the heroes of what was called “hard” science fiction, men to make a perilous future inhabitable. It was less of a future, it now seems, for good-hearted lugs like Riley or the white-shirted middle managers of Douglas, and more of a future for the members of the German Rocket Team.

When I met him in 1976, Dieter Huzel certainly didn’t look like the astronauts who had gotten us to the moon, although he had helped to get them there. He didn’t look like a hero of the Cold War, but his work would help deliver multiple 20-megaton warheads to targets in the Soviet Union. He didn’t look like one of Hitler’s former henchmen, either.

During the war, Ernie Pyle wrote admiringly, but with a flinty realism, about the “little routine men” of America who were fighting the war and winning it for a future they thought would belong to them. They thought that the anonymous work of dutiful men like themselves would add up to a postwar victory visible to everyone on some faraway frontier, like raising the flag on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi, in effect, harnessing Ernie Pyle’s “little routine men” to a rocket.

Embedded in Los Angeles’ aerospace culture are these contradictory images of men’s work and their usefulness. Over at Douglas, some “routine men” riveted together large parts of a “tomorrow” that has passed. And other men in white shirts and narrow ties managed only to threaten or cajole them, and offer them no greater image of the future. And some men reinvented themselves, but that proved more elusive than they had imagined.

One critic has named the Cold War the “supreme fiction” of its age. The Cold War made both Riley and Huzel; it fabricated my neighbors and the guys in white shirts and narrow ties at Douglas who managed them. It served none of them as well as they had hoped it would. But it did make, and still makes in a diminished form, the places in which most Californians live today.

As Joan Didion bleakly put it in her memoir Where I Was From, the Age of Aerospace had, she claimed, created an “artificial ownership class” of Californians whose possession of places like Lakewood was unreal, unearned, and just another fiction of the Cold War.

Will that sorrow be our only memory of the Age of Aerospace?

D. J. Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles. This article is adapted from a paper he presented at a conference titled “Rocket Science and Region: The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Aerospace Industry in Southern California.” The conference, held in August, was sponsored by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

_____________________________________________________
© 2007 Huntington Library. All rights reserved.
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
1151 Oxford Road  •  San Marino, CA  •  91108  •  626-405-2100
Contact us