Adversity Is Mother of Invention for Jobless Men : Employment: Laid-off engineers and designers find solace and new ideas for survival from others who share their plight. One group has begun to design a cleaner-fueled car.

Mike Williams and the boys called it the Suicide Club.

Just a bit of black humor from a bunch of laid-off engineers and designers who lost their jobs in the lingering economic doldrums smothering Southern California like brownish-gray smog.

Two winters ago, Williams recalls, they would gather at some local coffee shop to compare notes on how bad things had gotten, applying their analytical minds to things such as paying the mortgage and sending their children to private school--without an income.

The half a dozen engineers and auto designers prided themselves on being men who knew how things worked. Now they were confounded by hard times that had cost all of them their jobs--and some their homes and even marriages.

“We tried to bring each other up,” says Williams, a Canyon Country resident who in December, 1992, lost his $60,000-a-year aerospace engineering job with Rockwell International.

“But there were so many debts and family crises, it was hard to say anything that didn’t sound like one big cliche. Pretty soon, we began joking that our pep talks were more like a suicide club.”

Psychologists say there are many Suicide Clubs throughout Los Angeles and Southern California--perhaps called by other names--essentially, people who have teamed up to help one another emotionally through hard economic times.

“Misery loves company,” Pasadena career counselor Judith Grutter said. “And economic misery also loves constructive criticism. That’s what people are giving one another. It doesn’t have to come from a professional.”

From Mike Williams’ Suicide Club came a plan.

Big business had told them their services were no longer required: They were just too old or too expensive or too inexperienced. As the waitress poured yet another jolt of morning coffee, they hatched a strategy to earn a living: building the electric car of the future.

Four of them formed Specialized Power Systems with the goal of producing a “hybrid, alternative-fuel electric vehicle” that in the coming century would become the main transportation of the day.

While they continued to look for full-time work, the new partners holed up in their home offices to labor on the prototypes of their ESC--or environmental sports commuter--vehicle, a car they say will run on a clean-burning fuel such as propane gas. They contacted possible investors, and sold motorcycles and second cars to raise cash.

Meanwhile, other Suicide Club members assumed lesser investment roles--one delivering pizzas part time to bring in extra money.

Of course, the Northridge earthquake set them back a bit: A wall collapsed on their newly built test car chassis, forcing them to redesign the entire front end. Still, the project has breathed new life into the emotional psyches of formerly resigned, out-of-work professionals who might otherwise have called it quits.

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Williams knows there are no easy routes out of a recession. As he struggles to keep his home life together and fights the occasional depression, he works feverishly to market his electric car.

And get his life back on track.

“This recession brought out the inventor within me,” Williams said. “But this time, it’s for myself.”

Such independent strategies, experts say, exemplify the fierce entrepreneurial spirit often required to dig out of a financial hole.

“For some, these terrible economic times are a gift horse, a kick in the pants--the thing that jolts them into looking at more creative ways of earning a living they would never before have considered,” Grutter said.

For a white-collar professional such as Williams, becoming his own boss has meant traveling a new road.

He had always been the company man since he began designing cars in Detroit in the 1950s. At the age of 56 he had assembled a design resume ranging from cars to console TVs for companies such as Montgomery Ward, Chrysler and Disney.

The ugly end came as Williams and 2,000 other workers helped design a space station for Rockwell’s space systems division:

Just like that, they were all laid off.

Suddenly, this corporate ladder-climber was negotiating a footstool in his suburban kitchen. He had become a disregarded statistic of the working world, one of 100,000 aerospace and defense workers to lose their jobs since 1987--one of the walking wounded in a faltering job field that experts predict will lose another 100,000 to 200,000 jobs before 2000.

The layoff launched Williams on an emotional carnival ride. He has sought numerous engineering jobs and piecemeal consulting work to supplement his wife’s teaching salary--all the while staggering from the gut-wrenching blow of losing his place as the family breadwinner.

And he never knows when the dark feelings will come. He could be in his car, on the telephone or even in bed when seized by a powerful reality: He’s in a personal and professional drought with no end in sight.

“That’s when I start yelling at myself,” said the father of two college-age daughters. “In the car, I’ll look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Mike, shape up! Hey, lousy things happen and you just have to deal with them the best you know how. Feeling sorry for Michael Williams isn’t going to help.’ ”

He didn’t give up. He has sent out hundreds of resumes to engineering firms. He has landed only five interviews--all of them informal, look-see meetings with companies who had no real openings.

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Meanwhile, in the last year his home life had become stressful. He was cranky, believing that no one in his family appreciated how hard he was looking for work--just because he was at home most of the time now.

Worse yet, his once-commanding salary had been, for the most part, reduced to a $10 weekly allowance from Jean, his wife of 29 years.

“Suddenly, I was Mr. Mom. No matter what I did to land a job, it didn’t seem I was working hard enough. I wasn’t bringing in any money.”

The layoff has forced Jean Williams to make her own sacrifices. “My big complaint is that Mike is not Mr. Mom. He doesn’t do the things around the house I would do if I were laid off--the vacuuming and dishwashing,” the junior high school history teacher says.

“When I was home with the kids, I waited on him. But now that I’m working and he’s home, I don’t get the same treatment.”

Still, Mike Williams has done what he can.

To help pay the mortgage, he slashed unnecessary expenses. He discontinued magazine subscriptions. The family rarely went to restaurants and cut down on social phone calls--even local ones. To save on gas, if a trip wasn’t necessary, Williams didn’t make it.

Among the trips deemed necessary: the meetings of the Suicide Club.