COLUMN ONE : Payloads, Paydays, Palm Trees : For 50 years, Southern California soared with the defense industry. But then the impossible happened--the Cold War ended, and with it our golden way of life.
Nothing--not earthquake, not fire, not even the movies--has changed Southern California the way that more than a trillion dollars of federal defense money has.
The half-century-long marriage of the aerospace business and the military prodded the citrus-label towns of the 1920s and early ‘30s--backwaters of fragrant orange groves and flimsy movie studios--into becoming the dense cluster cities of the 1980s, all coruscating office towers and high-tech paychecks.
Peace was our profession, as a famous sign of the era said. Filling the mighty airborne armory of the Cold War and the Space Age made Southern California rich.
It was our economic heart, beating for so long, beating so reliably and sturdily, that after a while we almost forgot it was not the one we were born with.
But when the binary world of the Cold War crumbled with the Berlin Wall, that artificial heartbeat began to falter. With the vanishing jobs went some of the region’s underpinnings of status and security, leaving unease about what could come next.
This is the other historic shift, 50 years after the first, and probably no less profound in its effect.
Over that first half-century, military and business achieved a seamless unity of place and purpose.
Nurtured by ardent city fathers, showered by federal billions, aerospace displaced the beans and the strawberries and sowed a bumper crop of its own. Military bases and engineering shops and assembly plants and think tanks and universities grew across the San Fernando Valley, through Santa Barbara and San Diego and Pomona, in Huntington Beach and Pasadena.
Caltech’s assembly line alone turned out more than a million Navy rockets in World War II; they named the millionth one “Holy Moses.” The War Production Board bragged on the Golden State as “the Great Wall of California,” America’s arsenal of democracy.
The products changed by the decade, as the urgency of a world war shifted to the nuances of the cold one. Bombers and missiles and guidance systems and jetliners and spacecraft emerged from blueprints and “black” rooms, with names as familiar to some as Plymouth and Chevy: X-15, B-1B, the Blackbird and the Hornet, Viking and Mariner, Discovery.
“Aerospace Alley” crowded its R&D; shops, subcontractors, plants and runways along the arc of ocean from Santa Monica to Long Beach. Cities came to be linked with the firms that put them on the map: Burbank with Lockheed, Hawthorne with Northrop, Redondo Beach with TRW, Long Beach with McDonnell Douglas.
The company names glowed in lights as bright as any spelling out MGM or Paramount, and their dazzling new planes--when they were not classified--were “rolled out” for the admiring press and public as if at movie premieres. When the first two Douglas World Cruisers to circle the globe returned to Clover Field in Santa Monica, tens of thousands of people met them and a new dress design commemorated the feat.
From the plant gates emerged not only planes and jets. Flush new working and middle classes spent defense-funded paychecks on mortgages in raw new suburbs, the Lakewoods, Santa Monicas and Palmdales.
So entwined were “the city and the sword’--the phrase of historian Roger W. Lotchin, who wrote the recent book “Fortress California”--that across Southern California, people scarcely noticed where one left off and the other began.
* That tunnel on Sherman Way in Van Nuys passes under an airport runway that was first cleared of homes decades ago to accommodate military jets.
* Street signs around Los Angeles International Airport--Fleetwing and Bleriot and Earhart and Interceptor--still bear the names of famous planes and fabled aviators whose admirers settled the original airport, Mines Field, back when it was a barley patch.
* Women and minorities swarmed into the wartime work force. The Vultee aircraft company in Downey planned to have its first female workers report on April 1, 1940--but had to move back the start date, lest people think it was an April Fool’s joke. One black factory worker said in the oral history “Rosie the Riveter Revisited” that “my sister always said that Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen.”
* Almost every year since V-J Day, the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station has put on the biggest free air show in the country; it sends its band out to enliven Chamber of Commerce galas and Fourth of July sing-alongs.
* Children astride their bikes in the farthest, driest reaches of the San Fernando Valley hardly noticed when the ground shook in the early 1960s; they knew it was no earthquake, but the chemical thunder of Rocketdyne test engines in the Santa Susana Mountains, engines that would one day take men to the moon.
* In Tustin 50 years ago, the Navy raised up two blimp hangars that are still there, wooden caverns so vast that clouds form in their upper reaches.
* By 1990, Southern California defense workers drawing aerospace-related paychecks gave nearly $20 million to the local United Way--almost a third of the charity’s contributions.
* Every time an IBM exec or a President talks about some new “skunkworks” research project, they pay homage to the original Skunkworks, a stifling, stinking tent on the grounds of Lockheed, where the most innovative secrets of the Jet Age were put onto paper and then into airborne metal.
“Southern California is, in many respects, a creation of the Pentagon,” says Allen J. Scott, the director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at UCLA, who studied these matters for his new book, “Technopolis.”
In turn, the industry demanded good freeways and fine universities and modern airports, and it got them. It paid for broad, bungalow-set suburbs with the wages its prosperous workers took home. Its needs--for skills, for workers, for infrastructure and material, for bright young college graduates and obliging politicians--were everyone’s needs.
At its core was a new Brahmin techno-class of unprecedented numbers, part eggheads and part craftsmen.
The Job Machine
On the January day in 1961 that outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower told the nation of his misgivings about the “unwarranted influence” of the nation’s emerging “military-industrial complex,” more physicists and mathematicians and aerospace engineers were working in California than anywhere in the world.
One in three Nobel Prize winners lived here. College graduates with the right kind of degree were wooed ardently, and Jack Northrop set up his own university out by what became LAX to ensure getting the kind of skills he needed.
As Ike spoke, the spread of California’s own military-industrial complex was already unmatched: 43% of the manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles and Orange counties, and 75% in San Diego hung on government aerospace largess.
Every billion dollars, Reagan era Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger once figured, means 35,000 jobs. In the math of the “multiplier,” one well-paid defense position could spin off as many as 2 or 2 1/2 other jobs--the metal shop supplying some specialized part, the cleaners to keep the jumpsuits white, the paper company making the pasteboard boxes for the doughnuts that someone picks up on the way to the office.
In the fat years, 12,000 Southern California firms were linked to aerospace. It surpassed real estate as the region’s economic engine, surpassed movies and agriculture and banking.
When the jobs go--and in 1990, the year after the Berlin Wall fell, some 17,000 Southern California defense workers were laid off--the stability and security they brought goes with them. The disruption is felt in the eroding housing market, in oversubscribed U-Haul rentals, in a man laid off from his job as budget analyst at a big-name aerospace firm who had to find seasonal work filling out other people’s 1040 forms at a storefront tax office.
Over the last seven years, 60,000 aerospace jobs have vanished, taking with them another 90,000 related jobs. Base closures will take another estimated 33,000 jobs statewide. Those seven lean years are likely to be followed by seven leaner years, with the same numbers or worse.
These make the kind of headlines the newsmagazines love to concoct, like “L.A.: Powerhouse to Poorhouse,” a comeuppance to the state that has taken in about 20 cents of every defense dollar since Pearl Harbor.
Only a few in the first wave, like aircraft pioneer J. H. Kindelberger, fretted that the wartime boom was “a Donald Duck inflatable figure, about to deflate”; few talked of scaling back or diversifying. None contemplated the end of the Cold War.
“No region in history,” says Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, a businessman who ought to know, “would have ever turned down this type of business, even knowing in the future that they were going to lose it. . . .”
“This region was being subsidized by high-paying, blue-collar jobs. And as I’ve said before, it was to build things to kill people. It had to end, and it did end.”
The money made Southern California “fat, dumb and happy. . . . I’d love to tell you Californians should beat themselves up for it, but it’s consistent with every booming economy,” says USC’s Jon Goodman, director of the entrepreneur program in the School of Business Administration.
“A lot of what we’re going through now is a little bit like the (bust) 1930s related to the (boom) 1920s,” Goodman says. “This is our economic Pritikin diet.”
Steven Lindsey, 33, is a “defense brat” if anyone was--married to a former engineer and an Air Force veteran, the son of a retired Northrop project manager, now friend and neighbor of dozens of laid-off aerospace workers.
Lindsey still has a job, although he’s no longer a supervisor. From his office window at Hughes in El Segundo, he can see the two-block-long boneyard of the Rockwell complex.
Once it had been just about the highest-tech machine shop in the nation. Aerospace Alley gossip holds that top-secret, super-silent submarine propellers were made there.
In a few months, Lindsey has seen the past--40 years of work and pride--and maybe the future being dismantled. All that is left is “a level field with mountains of chopped-up granite. Kind of an awful thing to watch.”
The Friendly Skies
The military has been a part of Southern California since the summer of 1769, when Portola’s Spanish soldiers trekked up from San Diego and made camp beside the Los Angeles River, thus founding a city.
But so have a hundred other American cities been rooted in the military. Why, nearly 150 years later, did the modern military find its soul mate and its future in Southern California?
This was the buckle on what the authors of a recent book call America’s “gun belt,” the band of defense-dependent Southern and Western cities. It is not surprising, according to the book “The Rise of the Gunbelt,” that two of the technologies that defined 20th-Century imagination--flying and the movies--found a home here.
Early in the century, Southern California still had a frontier feel, wide-open, risk-taking. In 1909, the same year the Wright brothers’ company tested the nation’s first military plane, a man named Glenn Martin built Southern California’s first airplane in a converted church in Santa Ana.
In January, 1910, flaunting the mild winter weather the way the Rose Parade carriages did, California staged the nation’s first major air show in Dominguez Hills. Fine flying weather did have something to do with firms clustering here, but so did the fact that assembly plants didn’t need a lot of artificial heat or light to operate almost year-round.
Martin moved his business to L.A. in 1912; it was listed in the phone book under “amusements.” By the end of World War I, flying had proved itself valuable, if not yet strategic. Suddenly, everyone was building planes.
The Loughead--later Lockheed--brothers tried their hand at Navy flying boats in Santa Barbara in 1916 before coming to L.A. in 1924. In rented loft space in Hollywood, they undertook building the prototype of the plane that Amelia Earhart would fly.
In the Navy town of San Diego, a new industry was weighing in: T. Claude Ryan’s San Diego-to-L.A. flight service, inaugurated in 1925, was the nation’s first regularly scheduled year-round passenger airline.
In the early spring of 1927, a young Midwestern barnstormer nicknamed “Slim” asked Ryan to build him a monoplane. The shop boys put it together in a converted San Diego fish cannery, in time for “Slim”--Charles Lindbergh--to fly the Spirit of St. Louis alone and nonstop across the Atlantic.
“Air-minded,” Los Angeles called itself. The Chamber of Commerce aviation committee aggressively courted companies. Times publisher Harry Chandler helped raise the $15,000 to put Donald Douglas in business in an old movie studio in Santa Monica, making military planes and eventually the civilian DC models that flew the world.
Even after the shakeout of the Depression, aircraft building held on. By the time Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, 60% of the nation’s airframe manufacturers were here. War sent the industry into overdrive. “They’re building dive bombers in the land of Oz,” marveled Fortune magazine.
The future, though, was being made in the canyons of Pasadena. It was a closely held secret, says Caltech historian Judy Goodstein, that wartime Pasadena was the rocket-making capital of the nation. Enough high explosives were cached in Eaton Canyon to blow the city off the map.
Rocketry, satellites, spacecraft, the stuff dismissed as comic-book gizmos, would revolutionize warfare, and Caltech’s Robert A. Millikan and Theodore von Karman made sure it happened here. In 1946, a year after World War II ended, the first report out of the RAND Corp.--the Santa Monica-based think tank created by Gen. Hap Arnold and Donald Douglas--was about satellite development.
The missiles and rockets that changed the balance of world power came out of Southern California, with flamboyant names like Gargoyle, Snark, Thor, Polaris, Poseidon, Tomahawk.
Ten days after the Nuclear Age altered the world at Hiroshima, the president of the Aircraft Industries Assn. spoke about this mission in near-religious terms: “ . . . a trinity of air force, air commerce and aircraft industry . . . Pax Aeronautica.”
No grimy smokestacks, no sweaty, underpaid workers, but clean, sophisticated industry that boosted tens of thousands into the middle class--a growing city could only dream of such a bonanza.
Dick Harlow was one of three people on the planning staff of Huntington Beach when McDonnell Douglas’ aerospace division decided to move there in the early 1960s.
“McDonnell Douglas didn’t sit down and say, ‘OK, we’re thinking of coming to this city--what can you do for us?’ They said, ‘We’re coming to this city,’ and we all said, ‘Aren’t we lucky?’ ” says Harlow.
In Santa Monica, Douglas had been almost the only payroll in town, had swept company streets and city streets with its cleaning crews. Douglas “ was virtually the city of Santa Monica,” a onetime city official said in 1974, when Douglas announced it was leaving town after 50 years; it had been “invited out,” the firm said, because the city had more or less outgrown Douglas.
In 1955, Douglas’ Long Beach operation said its DC-8 operation would be gutted if voters did not approve a runway extension bond issue. In language that smacks of 1993 hardball, the general manager said Tucson, Ariz., had “promised us everything including the back gate to the city.” The bond issue passed.
In the San Fernando Valley, Rocketdyne gave city planners the aerial photos they needed to lay out a street grid in the 1960s, says Rocketdyne veteran Skip Wrightson, who’d been one of those boys who rode his bike to the shake and roar of Apollo engines in the Santa Susana Pass.
Aerospace was sui generis, part business and part subculture, governed not by price or marketplace considerations. Customer satisfaction? There was virtually only one customer--the government.
Young as he is, Steven Lindsey at Hughes feels the change. “Business performance is the No. 1 priority. We’re always trying to figure out how to trim and cut and make things more efficient, and technology is never the No. 1 priority by itself, the way it used to be.
It can’t be assembly line: “When you build things like satellites you build things in ones and twos . . . you don’t have the volume. So we end up doing a lot of manufacturing techniques the commercial world would find archaic. We assemble circuit boards with hand soldering--that is very typical for a satellite.”
Well-armored as it was, the industry rode a capricious current of politics and economics. Programs ended, and between the rush orders were layoffs and long faces. Lorraine Sadler is the administrative officer at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, a GOCO complex--government-owned, contractor-operated, rent free--alongside Runway 725, the sturdiest poured concrete runway in the Free World.
She has worked with 16 Air Force commanders at this nine-square-mile “production flight test installation,” where even now some 8,000 people work.
“It was horrible when (President Jimmy) Carter canceled the B-1 . . . people walking out of the building for the last time, it was heartbreaking,” she says. The worst time was the early 1960s when, among the hive of companies like Rockwell and Lockheed and Convair and Northrop, entire programs disappeared. Young, little Palmdale became an instant depressed area, she remembered.
People moved away, sneaking out of housing tracts in the middle of the night, unable to pay off their bills. They left the lights on and the milk bottles out.
When projects ended, people seemed to vanish. Dick Harlow was driving to work after some secret Douglas space program ended and looked around him and thought, “God, where did all the kids go?”
Engineers were a nomadic breed, but often they had to go no further than another firm with a new project, in Seal Beach or Pomona or Canoga Park. Each step up could mean a raise, a better title.
Smoothing out the rough spots were California’s politicians. Whatever else they spatted over, hawks and doves agreed on the need for more defense dollars. Lotchin, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, subtitled his book “Fortress California 1910-1961” with “Warfare to Welfare” because the arms buildup became something closer to an “employment program.”
Ben Rich is the father of the Stealth Fighter, a founding veteran of Lockheed’s Skunkworks. In the early days, the business was, he says, exciting and competitive. Eventually, though, “a lot of people started to take advantage of the situation and a few bad apples caused a problem for everybody. They had overruns, they underbid to get contracts . . . and figured if they overran, the government would cover them . . . we got too big an appetite.”
The industry has lost some luster in recent years amid cost overruns, fines, bribes and kickbacks with purchasers and public relations disasters like $425 hammers. Los Angeles historian John Weaver moved to North Carolina a few years ago and saw there a pattern he had remarked on here:
“In North Carolina, I’ve seen nothing in the paper, nothing from the politicians about any alternatives to growing tobacco. There is no Plan B, it’s always more and more tobacco, keep the subsidy up.
“And California didn’t prepare either.
“Nobody ever thought it would end,” he said. “We were never prepared for peace--nobody ever had a peace scare.”
Times librarian Mary L. Edwards contributed to this story.
About This Series
Today’s article is part of an occasional series, “Farewell to Arms: Reinventing Southern California After the Cold War.” As the massive defense buildup that shaped us wanes, The Times examines a region adjusting to a new and uncertain way of life.
* Today: Defense dollars turn into Southern California gold
* Monday: Looking beyond the rhetoric of defense conversion
* Tuesday: Three companies stake out strategies to survive
The Southland’s Downturn: A Misery Index
Southern California is home to the greatest concentration of high-tech weapons-making firms in the world. A look at how defense cuts have battered the industry:
From a Peak in ‘88, Defense Spending in California is Plunging (Billions in constant 1993 dollars) ‘97: $33 billion (Estimate) *
Jobs Also Are Plunging
Estimated defense-related job losses for state
Jan. 1988-93 Jan. 1993-97 Aerospace 140,000 90,000
*
The Damage to Workers Statewide.
1988 Oct. 1993 Percent change Aircraft/parts 159,600 103,800 -35% Search/navigation 123,600 68,900 -44% Missiles/space 79,900 45,700 -43% Communications equipment 30,900 28,200 - 9% Shipbuilding 13,100 10,700 -18% Total 407,100 257,300 -37%
*
Losses in the Southland
Aerospace job losses since 1988 Los Angeles County: 64% Orange and San Diego Counties: 19% Santa Clara County: 7% Rest of state: 10% *
The Region’s Big Firms Haven’t Been Spared Job Losses
Direct Indirect losses losses Lockheed 9,900 27,720 Northrop 8,800 24,640 McDonnell-Douglas 16,500 46,200 General Dynamics 10,950 30,660 Rockwell 2,100 5,880 Hughes 12,700 35,560
*
Estimates of indirect jobs are based on a “multiplier” of up to 1.8 indirect jobs plus each direct job lost. Some estimates use a multiplier ranging from 1.5 to 3
*
Housing Prices Reflect Tough Times in Communities Where Some of the Major Players Reside (Median price per square foot)
July 1990 July 1993 Percent change El Segundo $216.11 $181.18 -16.2% Lakewood $170.90 $140.12 -18.0% Long Beach $168.20 $141.53 -15.9% Palmdale $ 93.66 $ 72.24 -22.9% Torrance $217.69 $171.23 Anaheim $141.26 $124.05 -12.2% Seal Beach $217.70 $166.67 -23.4% Santa Ana $151.05 $129.73 -14.1% Fullerton $152.43 $136.34 -10.6%
*
Manfacturing Jobs Are a Big Part of the Work Force
Defense-related manufacturing jobs as a percentage of total manufacturing jobs Los Angeles and Orange Counties: 20% Statewide: 13% *
The Survivors and Where They Stand
There are three large aircraft assemply lines left in California. They represent half the military aircraft built nationwide. Their status:
B-2 by Northrop in Pico Rivera: Company to close plant, which employs 7,600, around 1997. B-2 work also done in Palmdale.
F/A-18 by Northrop in El Segundo: Fighter program still receives strong support.
C-17 Cargo jet by McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach: Pentagon hasn’t placed order, and program may be canceled.
Sources: McKinsey Company Inc.; Commission on State Finance; Calififornia Employment Development Department; U.S. Department of Labor; Dataquick Information Systems; Governor’s Office of Research and Planning
Research by NONA YATES and MARY EDWARDS /Los Angeles Times
Cold War Relics
A San Fernando Valley tour reveals the imprints of a generation-old defense cutback
Long before the current round of defense cutbacks, the San Fernando Valley became a kind of museum to the early Cold War era. At that time, it was feared that Soviet bombers would sweep down from Siberia, armed with the Soviets’ newly built “atomic bombs.” The Valley-with Rocketdyne at the west end, Lockhead on the east and many smaller aerospace firms between-would have been an important target of any Soviet attack, a gateway to the additional aerospace and naval targets to the south. With memories of the World War II destruction of Germany’s industrial transport and administrative structure by U.S. and British conventional bombers only a few years old, the United States tried to throw up a shield in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s.
The bombers never came and by the 1960s, ICBMs made the defenses obsolete. But today, and for years to come, the defensive works will be visible throughout the Valley, the only monuments to a war that was never fought.
NIKE anti-aircraft missile launching base
Location: Oat Mountain, on the ridge of Santa Susana Mountains
Description: A double-fenced, high-security compound housing dozens of NIKE missiles and more than 100 soldiers. The facility had three underground launching rooms.
Status: In operation through the late 1960s, it was used as a California Conservation Corps training center from 1978 to 1990. Now owned by the city of Los Angeles, closed to the public.
CIA Station
Location: Northwest Valley near Corbin and Roscoe
Description: Groups of Russian- and Chinese-speaking employees monitored Soviet and Chinese radio traffic in places such as Siberia and Manchuria in a station of the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Operated from late 1940s to mid 1950s.
NIKE command post
Location: San Vicente Mountain, above Lake Encino Reservoir
Description: A scattering of towers and concrete bunkers was once a command post to be used to track Soviet bombers on radar and coordinate anti-aircraft missile attacks from Valley launch sites. Radars were operated round-the-clock from underground bunkers to protest Southern California from nuclear attack.
Status: Closed in 1968, the Army turned it over to the city of Los Angeles in 1973 to be converted into a park.
NIKE anti-aircraft missile launching base
Location: Encino, on Victory Boulevard
Description: Once the headquarters for the NIKE missile bases, it had three firing pits with movable roofs and missile elevators.
Status: In 1972 it was taken over from the Army and became a California Air National Guard Base.
Air raid sirens
Location: There may be as many as 75 sirens, like this one atop the Van Nuys Municipal Building, spaced at one-mile intervals across the Valley, and as many as 400 citywide. They were to be sounded in the event of an air raid, as a warning to seek shelter.
Sherman Way tunnel
Location: Van Nuys, on Sherman Way
Description: To accommodate early jet fighters that were to be based at Van Nuys Airport for the city’s defense, the runway had to be lengthened and hundreds of homes razed. The tunnel was built to prevent the closure of Sherman Way. By the time construction ended, however, the close-in bomber defense role was shifted to NIKE anti-aircraft missiles.
Nuclear war communication center
Location: Sherman Oaks, on Ventura Boulevard at Kester Avenue
Description: A tall windowless building was built by Pacific Bell to withstand nuclear calamity. With walls of 15-inch-thick, steel-reinforced concrete, it could be hermetically sealed. Its survival would ensure that a government communication network would still be intact.
Status: Built in 1969, the building’s underground bunker-like emergency center is still maintained by Pacific Bell to be used in the event of a large earthquake.
Nike Missiles
A network of 16 NIKE batteries was built to protect the Los Angeles area. The $2.5-million sites were completed in 1957. But by 1970 most had been abandoned or converted to other uses.
The group of defense missiles included:
Nike Ajax: Test-fired in 1951, the radar-guided Ajax was 21 feet long and capable of speeds up to 1,500 miles per hour. It carried a conventional explosive warhead.
Nike Hercules: At 27 feet, it was longer than its predecessor and carried a nuclear warhead. Introduced in 1958, with a range of 75 miles, it could travel at supersonic speeds.
Sources: Researched and written by TERRY MCGARRY / Los Angeles Times
