Fall of Aerospace Takes Heavy Toll on Families : Layoffs: High salaries meant Southland’s technical class could enjoy a stable home life. Then shock waves hit.

On its surface, the wasting of Southern California’s aerospace industry is a spiritless tale of corporate downsizing and defense conversion and thousands of jobs vanished and billions of dollars lost.

But behind the front doors of thousands of families who came to depend on an industry they believed would never stumble, it is a story of alarm clocks no longer set, of men looking for a reason to shave, of 20 business suits hanging unworn, of a little girl scolded during piano lessons, of white socks turned pink when a husband takes over the laundry, of sex lives ruined and sex lives renewed, of a husband asking his wife why there is no more bologna in the refrigerator and a wife imploring her husband: “Tell me everything is going to be all right.”

The withering of an industry that once fueled nearly half of all manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles and Orange counties has ravaged the economy of the state. And perhaps no single entity has taken a harder pounding than the Southern California family.

From the executive shoved into an early retirement to the engineer forced to pawn his wife’s engagement ring, the defense industry’s decline has tugged at the very fabric of the family. It has made handymen of Ph.D.s, upset the balance in households that once hummed with routine and confounded children who do not understand why Mommy can never afford things any more. It has created unbridgeable rifts and forged unshakable bonds, one of which turned a workaholic engineer into Mr. Mom.

Back in the boom years, the industry’s generous paychecks and irresistible perks had made the dream possible in Southern California--almost overnight. College graduates were fielding three offers at a time. Twenty-five years ago, Northrop begged graduate student Jacob Ramon to start work as an engineer even before he finished his final exams. Some people filled out applications and were hired without so much as an interview. Need bodies; Rockwell will train.

The boom spawned not only Ozzie and Harriet families with stay-at-home moms but thousands of career women who went to work as everything from mechanics to managers. It allowed Daphyne Jenkins--a single mother of two--to rise from airplane parts cleaner to computer operator with enough money to splurge on $7 bottles of shampoo.

Engineers leaped from one corporation to another, driving up wages and bonuses every step of the way--$35,000, $65,000, $85,000. Families blossomed. Homes were bought. Spas were built. College funds were started.

Then, almost overnight, many saw their dream yanked away. Layoffs had always been little more than an annoyance to a talented defense worker--when Northrop ran out of work, McDonnell Douglas had some. But this time it was as though something had died. No one was hiring. Every Friday, employees waited with nervous stomachs to hear who would be next.

Like never before, the cutting this time didn’t stop with the blue-collars. Middle and upper management, the people promised job security with every promotion, were going too. And once out, there seemed to be no getting back in.

A Huntington Beach microcircuits engineer with no fewer than four prestigious degrees has been out of work for 2 1/2 years without a single interview. Ramon, the engineer who was living a mile from the beach and bringing down $60,000 a year when El Segundo’s Aerospace Corp. gave him notice three years ago, says he can’t get a job today delivering pizza.

“Letters come from the bank threatening to foreclose and you look at 10 or 15 bucks and you try to figure out if you are going to buy formula or diapers,” Ramon said. “After a year we had exhausted everything. Even the engagement ring had to go. We are just trying to survive.”

Any layoff in these times is bound to be devastating. But in many ways, aerospace families fell hardest. They had depended on companies that were almost paternalistic in their benefits and attitudes--companies that seemed pitted against each other for the title of Model Employer. These firms embraced not only the worker, but the worker’s family, with pay raises that were regular and fat, generous medical coverage, college funds, retirement benefits. One firm gave employees the week off between Christmas and New Year’s, and most of the others promptly followed suit.

The life was so good that sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, spouses would go to work for the same company. As the American worker encountered more challenges in the ‘80s, aerospace expanded to meet the need. Soon entire families were looking to the corporation for legal counseling, on-site child care, mental health counseling, even recreation. (Northrop has 33 clubs offering everything from team bowling to gourmet cooking lessons.)

Those who got the pink slips lost more than a job. There were company picnics and Christmas dances. If Junior had a drug problem, Rocketdyne had the counselor to help. TRW issued pamphlets alerting managers about employee stress. Even when Hughes offered Ross Iwamoto an ultimatum--move his reluctant family to Tucson or take his layoff papers--the company had a psychiatrist and stress-management seminar on hand to help him through it.

“People got tied into the company very strongly. I saw young people in their 20s who were already putting away money for retirement. There was really a feeling that you couldn’t get any more solid than this,” said Dr. Malcolm Miller, a Los Angeles clinical psychologist who has treated scores of displaced aerospace workers.

“Then the rug was pulled out from under them.”

*

Rick Huntington answers the phone late on a Wednesday morning and stops to turn down the volume on the television set. The commercials on at this hour of the day are so depressing--”Want a career in modeling?. . . . Enroll now for an exciting and rewarding career as a medical assistant. . . .”

Sitting at home at this time of day took some getting used to. Even after Kaiser Marquardt in Van Nuys laid him off a year ago at age 38, he kept getting up at 5 a.m. Every day he searches the classifieds. Sometimes he puts on a suit and passes out resumes in industrial complexes.

When they took away his job, they took away his identity, he said. What is he if not a master scheduler? He started doing odd jobs and repair work around town. If something doesn’t happen soon he believes that he’ll have to wait tables.

“I feel so worthless. I go through periods where I don’t even want to get out of bed. But you have to fire yourself up,” he said. “A lot of people depend on you, you can’t lie in bed and not shave for a week.”

His wife, Barbara, works 40 hours a week, so he tries to help out around the house. He is less efficient at housework than he was at cluster bombs, but she worries more about his self-esteem than the way he does the laundry.

“I try not to interfere when he does stuff around the house,” she said. “I know it’s his way of sharing the load. You end up with pink socks once in a while, but we can live with that.”

The year after the Berlin Wall fell, 17,000 defense jobs disappeared. Families cut out luxuries like movies, magazine subscriptions, restaurants and call-waiting. They were less prepared to confront the upset in the delicate equilibrium of the household.

Spouses who had worked for pleasure or mad money or even a much-needed second income were instantly recast as the main breadwinner. Some of the jobless, the men in particular, seemed wiped out by the experience, their egos in shambles, their sense of self-worth gone.

“I never got a bad evaluation,” so many men recount, bewildered by a company that suddenly seemed not to value them and oblivious to the thousands of workers all over the country who are in the same shoes. They blame it on age discrimination, that heart attack they had, anything but a global political power shift.

“It has led them to question the values that they were brought up with, that if you apply yourself and work hard, you don’t have to worry,” Miller said. “Many of those people were there to stay. It was like being thrown out of the nest.”

Families all over Southern California were reeling. A South Bay wife worried to distraction about her husband’s veiled suicide threats. Iwamoto, obsessed with the notion of Tucson, found that even after a full night’s sleep he could hardly keep his eyes open at work. Ramon, whose mind races whenever he lies down, turned insomniac and said he has not slept in his bed in three years.

Family members lost not only the paycheck but the support network. Laid-off employees are no longer eligible for all those services that gave structure to their lives.

“They start arguing and become irritated. The whole life plan for retirement, college, is all gone,” Miller said.

Even for those still on the payroll, there is turmoil. Hope Duncan is one of six F/A-18 fighter jet mechanics left at Northrop in El Segundo. Once there were 28. Her workbench falls at the end of a long row of empty ones. They used to be a fun group, laughing during their 42-minute lunches and reporting to work in costume every Halloween. Last October, she came as a witch. She was the only one dressed up.

The massive layoffs have left Northrop shorthanded, so Duncan works 12 hours a day, six days a week. Her husband is a Northrop quality engineer. They rarely see each other.

“I have no life. I come in at 4 and get home at 4. My husband goes in at 6 and gets home at 7:15. I’m just getting out of the shower. I’ve eaten, now he’s eating. He finishes, I’m ready to go to bed and he’s just getting in the shower.”

The money has never been better, but they are afraid to spend it. They never turn down overtime or call in sick. How dare they when so many others are begging for work? One day she came to the plant with the stomach flu.

“I don’t know how much longer the work will last. Northrop is my life. I don’t know anything but building aircraft,” she said as she riveted some obscure jet part on the deserted assembly line.

The signs of hard times are all around and seem even more pronounced in aerospace outposts. A San Diego public library can’t keep a resume book on the shelf. At a Santa Clarita church, the grief seminar developed to help people cope with the death of a loved one is more often attended by the unemployed trying to cope with the passing of a career.

Mostly, though, the disruption goes on behind closed doors, reaching into kitchen cupboards stocked with the makings for spaghetti, tuna fish casserole and other dishes that stretch. It invades Woody Woodruff’s Rancho Palos Verdes living room where, forced to retire four years early from a vice president’s position at TRW, he tries to stay out from under his wife’s feet.

“I would leave at 6:30 in the morning and wouldn’t be back until 6:30 at night,” said Woodruff, a tall, articulate ex-Air Force colonel who was earning more than $100,000 a year when given the choice between early retirement and unemployment.

“It was her world. Now we run out of bologna sooner than expected because I’m in the refrigerator for lunch instead of eating out. She can’t just do her aerobics when I’m around. When her girlfriends call, they want to know why I’m answering the phone.”

The shake-up can also be hard on teen-agers. One San Pedro high school freshman was furious when her parents insisted she earn baby-sitting money if she wanted to go to Disneyland. “We used to spend $700 a month on her ice-skating lessons,” the mother said. “Now it’s: ‘You want to perm you hair? Get a job.’ ”

Younger children have less trouble with the material losses than with the change in personality that can overtake an anguished parent. Seven-year-old Annette Iwamoto asked her father why her mother was scolding her so much when she practices the piano.

“They’ve been thrown for a mean loop,” said the Rev. R. Preston Price, pastor at United Methodist Church in Santa Clarita.

Price said some families have elected to move rather than admit that they can no longer treat the soccer team to pizza.

“They don’t know where to go, but they would rather make new friends under the new flag of lower-middle class instead of upper-middle class,” he said.

It is difficult to know how families will weather this free fall--it isn’t over yet. Most of Miller’s patients drop out of therapy after the medical benefits expire, even when fee adjustments or less expensive alternatives are offered. There is no system to keep track of them. “I’m not sure we have seen the full repercussions from this yet,” he said.

However, a few families report unseen benefits in all the upheaval.

“Downsizing is not always bad. I’ve had people report they don’t need three cars and all the frills,” said Mary Ann Magee, an El Segundo career consultant. “Instead of getting five of something, they get one.”

It has helped some couples rediscover each other: An Orange County engineer in his 60s joined a gym and works out every morning at 7 with his wife. Woodruff said the times he feels he is in his wife’s way are more than compensated by the lazy afternoons they spend “noodling around the town.”

It was the best and worst thing that ever happened to Ramon.

Baby Debra was conceived somewhere around the time Ramon’s boss assured him that his job was safe. Three weeks later, they laid him off. By the time she was born, the savings were already gone. Three hundred resumes sent around the world led nowhere. His wife, Nori, went to work full time as a bank teller.

This may be the crisis of his life--at the age of 50 he has borrowed from every possible source, including the government compensation his elderly Japanese American in-laws received from their World War II internment.

But in one big way, he said, aerospace did him a favor. “I raised her,” boasted this man who never wanted children, who now spends afternoons at the playground with 2-year-old Debra, singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” (Or “Little Little Twinkle Star,” as he puts it.)

“Nori kids me that I stole her baby. If the kid needs a diaper change, it’s Daddy. When she wants anything, she comes to me, even when Mommy is home. She is the most loving, adorable kid you could ever know. This is the blessing in disguise,” he said.

“If only I didn’t have to worry about what we will eat tomorrow or where we will live. Every now and then Nori looks at me with those eyes and says: ‘Tell me everything is going to be all right.’ I try to say it as convincingly as I can.”

About This Series

Today’s story is part of an occasional series, “A Farewell to Arms: Reinventing Southern California After the Cold War.” As the massive defense buildup that shaped the region wanes, The Times examines the impact on individual workers, their families and a town.

* Today: The decline in defense spending hits families where they live.

* Tuesday: El Segundo learns the price of peace.