Employees Sad at Closing--but Not Surprised : Aerospace: The McDonnell Douglas workers at the Torrance plant foresaw the move in the shutdown of the company store two years ago, the growing number of empty parking spaces, the loss of contracts.

For nearly 25 years, Linwood Foy, a machinist for Douglas Aircraft Co., bought his plaid shirts, his kitchen mixing bowls and his postage stamps at the company’s employee store. When he couldn’t pay his electric bill, the company store lent him the cash. Before the start of every school year, when his children needed new shoes and notebooks, he took them there to be fitted and supplied.

“A lot of people raised their kids over there,” Foy said, pointing to the long brick building, now a dusty storage area, across the street from the aircraft maker’s sprawling Torrance site. “When they closed the store two years ago, everybody knew something was up.”

For most of the 2,000 workers at the plant, the announcement Friday that it will close next year came as no surprise. The news was prefigured in the company store’s closing two years ago and the growing number of empty spaces in the parking lot. Some employees had noticed the loss of contracts. Others spoke of a steady erosion of building services and equipment.

So most of the workers knew that the plant’s days were numbered. What they didn’t know Friday was what to do next.

Paul Gordon, an inventory clerk who joined the company in 1979, said he planned to “cut back the budget and pray” in adjusting to the loss of his $17-an-hour job, and of the health insurance that had helped him through his last operation for cancer. “If I have to work three jobs a week, that’s what I’ll do.”

Finding one job, no less three, may prove difficult. Gordon and his co-workers are facing unemployment during California’s worst recession in decades. Although the economy is showing signs of improvement and air travel is expected to boom in the years ahead, the aerospace and defense sectors seem to have entered a period of extended contraction. Right now, cutthroat competition and recession have slowed airline industry orders, and the disappearance of the Soviet threat has already affected military orders.

Against this backdrop, the Torrance employees reacted to Friday’s news with stoicism and sadness. Few knew what jobs they would find in a year, but most doubted that future work would come close to the high union wages they earn in Torrance.

“If you work in aerospace, you’d better save--it’s so unstable,” Gordon said. “Up to last month they kept saying they were going to stay open, but I’d see the inventory go down. You’d start losing orders in your department. Some departments were being totally shut down, moved to other facilities.

“And then,” said Gordon, who was one of 250 employees who received his pink slip last week, “they started putting permanent instead of temporary on the layoff slips.”

Like many of his colleagues, Gordon blamed “the economy and the government,” rather than McDonnell Douglas, for the closure: “This government doesn’t take care of its own. They help out other countries, but not those right in front of them.”

Steve Wortman, a drop-hammer operator, faulted the Environmental Protection Agency “for fining Douglas, our own expensive labor, and the fact people just aren’t flying anymore.”

Another employee, Pat La Course, wished “for more backup from Congress and Gov. (Pete) Wilson.

“They could have subsidized us better, they could have looked ahead,” La Course said as she walked across the rapidly emptying parking lot. “I think this place is going to become a ghost town. I think a good part of the state is going to become a ghost town.”

McDonnell’s Prescence in Southern California McDonnell Douglas Corp. said it will close its factory in Torrance by sometime in 1993, erasing the jobs of 2,000 workers making parts for MD-80, MD-90 and MD-11 jetliners and the C-17 military cargo jet. With the Torrance closure, fewer than 100,000 people will hold full-time jobs with the aerospace giant as Pentagon spending and sluggish commercial airline orders take their toll. In addition to three Southern California plants, McDonnell has facilities in Columbus, Ohio; Salt Lake City; Macon, Ga.; Melbourne, Ark,; and St. Louis, Mo.

Unit of McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Co.

Culver City

Employees: under 1,000

Products: helicopter machine guns

Douglas Aircraft

Torrance

Douglas Aircraft

Long Beach

Employees: 30,000

Products: Air Force C-17 cargo jet, the MD-80 and MD-11 jetliners

McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Co.

Huntington Beach

Employees: 7,000

Products: Portions of the Strategic Defense Initiative, space vehicle hardware, nose section of the MD-80 jetliner, defense electronics equipment * MAIN STORY: A1