Palmdale Flying High Again After Air Force OKs Funds
The old-timers, people who’ve been here 10, 15, 25 years, tend to calendar their lives with references to the L-1011, SR 71, TR-1, F-5--fighters, spy planes, whatever is newest and fastest in manned aircraft. Even if the people who live here aren’t personally involved in the aerospace industry, even if they moved here for the high, dry desert climate or the opportunity to get in on a fast-growing economy, aerospace is what’s happening here--and everyone knows it.
Boom or bust. That’s been Palmdale’s history.
Stunned Developers
“You’re either living high on the hog or sow belly. That’s been the aircraft industry since its inception,” said Mel Baker, executive director of the Antelope Valley Board of Trade.
There was a period in the mid-’60s, in fact, when the nation’s priorities had switched from manned aircraft to missiles and many Palmdale residents simply moved away--leaving stunned developers with 4,000 houses in mid-construction.
It’s boom time again in this town of 16,000. It began in 1981 when Rockwell International won approval for its B 1-B bomber program. Since then housing developments with names like Summerwinds and The Highlands have popped up on every other hill. Sizzler restaurants and McDonald’s and Spanish-style shopping centers are going up next to fields of scrub brush and cactus.
What with Palmdale bringing in the industry, Lancaster--the Antelope Valley’s largest city (population is estimated at 54,000)--is now considered by many locals to be a bedroom community. It’s there that you find the major stores: Sears, Gemco and Mervyn’s.
So with Thursday’s announcement that an $8-billion contract between the Air Force and Rockwell had been formally approved came a collective sigh of relief around town. By Friday afternoon it seemed almost everyone in Palmdale and Lancaster had heard the news about the contract, one of the largest contracts ever awarded by the Pentagon: With contract negotiations completed, the final 82 airframes of the B 1-B bomber could be completed at Rockwell’s Palmdale plant.
Just a Formality
People here knew it was just a formality, that the money had long been appropriated by Congress and it was just a matter of stipulating the final purchase price ($282 million each for the final 82 aircraft). Rockwell had already upped the number of employees at its Palmdale plant from 75 in 1981 to its current level of 6,000 and put $100 million into its facilities on the old Air Force Plant 42, a nine-square-mile complex of government-owned runways, hangars, assembly plants and warehouses that were established for flight testing in the 1940s and are now occupied by Lockheed, Northrop and Rockwell.
Still, you don’t have to be around aerospace very long to learn that nothing’s completely certain until the specifications are specified and paper is signed.
“I guess it means I’ll be employed for another three years,” said a burly man in denim overalls standing near the front of the line at Antelope Valley Bank. He was nervous about giving his name, security and all that. But, sure, it was fine to say it was good news about the contract actually being signed. He was a tube fitter on the B-1. He’d been laid off when the space shuttle program was cut back, and it was the B-1B program that got him working again.
Same for Richard Brown, who was standing in the same line. He’d worked for Lockheed until its layoffs four or five years ago, then he’d done construction work in Sylmar. Now he is back in aerospace, working as a structures mechanic on the B-1B and depositing his second Rockwell paycheck.
Deposit Windows
The two drive-through deposit windows at Antelope Valley Bank at the Bank Plaza shopping center in Palmdale were backed up eight cars each. Inside the bank, the line wrapped around to the door and was headed outside. Aerospace people, just about all of them. Rockwell pays every Friday, Lockheed on Thursdays, several other aerospace firms on the Friday nearest the 15th.
It’s a scene of prosperity, but it hasn’t always been that way.
“Layoffs are a way of life here,” said Dorothy Horvath, a clerk at the new Spanish-style library. She and her husband, Matthew, moved to Palmdale in 1968 so he could take a job at McDonnell Douglas Corp.
“He had no seniority, and when McDonnell had its cutbacks in 1970 he was among those who had to go.”
But the Horvaths decided to remain in Palmdale and her husband became a school principal. “He went into education,” she said. “It’s more stable.”
Another clerk at the library, Bonnie Vaughan, came here 25 years ago with her folks who were drawn to the warm weather. She said her father was head electrician on Lockheed’s X-15 project but when it ended he was laid off. A common occurrence, but, according to Vaughan, “once was enough for my dad. He retired. It’s not like the ‘50s or ‘60s now. Every time there’d be a layoff it would be a ghost town here.”
Steady Employment
If aerospace employees are burrowing in at the prospect of steady employment, the people who make things happen in the Antelope Valley were virtually gloating this weekend that nothing--not even the vagaries of aerospace contracts--will stop them now. Get a good look at these 2,500 square miles of high desert, they were saying, because soon this will be another San Fernando Valley.
While aerospace jobs initially drew people to the Antelope Valley, others have discovered the area’s attractions. Of the valley’s 225,000 residents, aerospace employees account for about 20,000, according to most estimates. Most of the people moving into the valley, said Palmdale Chamber of Commerce president Roger Persons, owner of the Chapel of the Light Mortuary, are commuting to jobs in Los Angeles.
Said Craig Stevenson, a Minnesota native who’s manager of Gemco and a member of the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce: “You used to be able to get on the freeway at any hour and it would be empty. But now, there’s a steady stream of people going back and forth to L.A. You see all those commuter vans. I like to refer to this area as the next San Fernando Valley. I don’t see us ever stopping.”
Developer Art Wallace agreed. “Even if aerospace contracts ease off, we’ve got people’s interest. It’s like Orange County. First, you’ve got to have a reason. Then it takes off by itself.”
Palmdale’s lure? Reasonably priced housing. “You can buy a home here for $75,000 that would cost you $135,000 in Los Angeles,” Persons said.
Residents don’t talk of Palmdale in terms of love at first sight. “It takes about a year. Then you either love it or you move away,” said Wallace, who moved here in 1952, just about the same time Lockheed opened its Palmdale plant. “It’s the winds. When we first moved here, my wife said when she grew up in Oklahoma and they had winds like here, they’d crawl in a storm cellar.”
As far as Persons is concerned, the winds are the price you pay for waking up in the morning and “if you can’t see Tehachapi, you can at least see Big Bear. It kind of overrules not being able to see Chinatown from downtown.”
A little chauvinism here. Come to the Antelope Valley, Persons said, and you have four seasons, even snow in the winter. And the location. He has season tickets to the Dodgers, regularly takes his boat to King Harbor in Redondo Beach, but also is just 45 minutes from ski areas.
The Aerospace Connection
Though nobody’s about to put down the aerospace connection, Persons contends there is as much controversy over the viability of B 1-B bombers and SR 71 spy planes here as anywhere else.
Nevertheless, to a large extent, the aerospace industry has established the character of Palmdale and environs, said the Antelope Valley Board of Trade’s Mel Baker. “This is a high-tech area. College degrees are common. The average paycheck is $28,000. And I’ll tell you, people here are real sensitive to national politics in the air-transport business.
“Listen, I’ll give you a good quote: I can get you a guy who’s been in outer space quicker than I can find a ditchdigger.” He laughed.
“We’re really proud of what’s happened to us,” said Persons, who moved to the Antelope Valley from Riverside 20 years ago. “The space shuttle being manufactured here. The B 1-B bomber now, and they’re saying the Stealth bomber is just a matter of time. Everyone’s looking at us now.”
