In Glory Days, Fullerton Plant Stood Tall in Nation’s Defense

It was built on 350 acres in the gently sloping hills of the city’s northwest corner. With its broad lawns and stands of towering trees, the sprawling Hughes Aircraft aerospace complex looks more like a college campus than an industrial outpost of the Cold War.

But they built air-defense systems there. And anti-submarine systems. And battlefield radar.

During its 37-year history, Hughes’ Fullerton operation earned a reputation as the world’s preeminent supplier of air-defense systems, and one of the leading makers of surface and anti-submarine systems for the Navy.

But the boom times at Hughes ended long before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The company’s announcement Monday that it will effectively shut down its massive facility over the next two years and that most of the 6,800 employees will either be transferred or laid off brings Hughes’ long and distinguished tenure in Fullerton to a close.

The glory days have turned to anxious moments for current workers and a time for reflection for former employees who remember working at Hughes when aerospace was king in Orange County.

“It was fantastic,” says Ray Turner, 65, of La Habra, who retired from Hughes last year after 24 years. “I also worked 18 years for North American Rockwell and I will, without question, say that Hughes Aircraft was the best company around. The morale was high, the technology was there, it was just growing.

“It’s a shame it had to end like this.”

The eventual closing of the Hughes plant, for nearly four decades the city’s largest employer, will end a significant chapter in the history of Fullerton, where the company has played a key role not only in the economy but in the community at large. Many Hughes workers have served on school boards, PTAs and the Chamber of Commerce, in the police reserve and as community volunteers.

“Hughes is Fullerton, and Fullerton is Hughes,” Mayor A.B. (Buck) Catlin has said more than once.

“Howard saw the need for acquiring land and he saw opportunity,” Catlin says, referring to the company’s legendary founder, Howard Hughes. “He made a good land deal.”

Michael Welds, a personnel manager for Hughes Aircraft from 1954 to his retirement in 1978, says: “They claimed Howard Hughes never put his feet in Fullerton. But he flew over it. And he said, ‘Well, it’s not a bad spot there.’ ”

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The role of Hughes Aircraft in Fullerton is part of the larger story of the aerospace industry in shaping Orange County in the post-World War II years, a time that saw the county evolve from an agricultural backwater to develop a factory-driven economy in which aerospace for years was the cornerstone.

Northrop Corp. of Hawthorne was the first big aerospace company to arrive, clearing an Anaheim orange grove to build a missile factory in 1951. Hughes’ 1957 arrival was followed by Philco-Ford Aeronutronic in Newport Beach in 1959. In 1962, McDonnell Douglas Corp. built plants in Huntington Beach as did Rockwell International in Anaheim.

Historian Jim Sleeper says the burgeoning aerospace industry in the ‘50s marked “the end of Orange County simply being a bedroom community” for people working in Los Angeles. “This was the beginning of the smokeless industries in Orange County and it subsequently has been supplemented by other electronics and research firms.”

When Hughes Aircraft arrived in town, the city economy was undergoing a change from a petroleum-industry base, says Fullerton historian Bob Ziebell, former managing editor of the Fullerton Daily News Tribune.

By the mid-’50s, he says, “we knew we had to have an economic foundation to support the services that would be required by the growth in population. Fullerton was one of the first cities in Orange County to adopt a master plan and they put special emphasis on bringing industry to Fullerton.”

Los Angeles-based Hughes Aircraft decided to move to Fullerton because of the company’s success in the early ‘50s with building avionics packages for Air Force fighters--essentially airborne radar, cockpit computers and displays, and radar-guided missiles.

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Wanting to expand into new markets by building ground versions of what they were building for the air, Hughes officials chose Fullerton primarily because it offered open land that would allow them to test outdoor radar equipment without interfering with neighbors’ TVs and other electronic devices. (All testing is now done indoors.)

Nicholas Begovich remembers a hot June day in 1957 when he and some 200 other Hughes workers from throughout Southern California opened the doors of the company’s newest division: a pair of small stucco buildings next to Fullerton Airport.

“We had the whole world to show our wares,” says Begovich, who at 36 moved from his home in West Los Angeles to Fullerton to head the engineering department of the company’s unit for ground-based and ship-borne electronics.

Within two years, Hughes’ young Fullerton operations had moved to state-of-the art labs and offices perched at the top of the area known as Sunny Hills, and it was indeed on the world stage. The division soon won a $400-million contract--then the largest in Hughes Aircraft’s history--to develop NATO’s air defense system for Europe. “We were the air defense system for the free world,” says Begovich, now 72.

But today, Begovich’s voice quavers as he talks about a remarkable 37-year journey--marked by technological breakthroughs and employment that peaked at nearly 15,000 in the mid-1980s--that has come full circle.

Says Begovich, who left Hughes in 1970 but remains in Fullerton: “We’re going back to where they were in the 1950s.”

Indeed, Hughes Ground Systems Group, as the division was called for many years, will be cut to just a few hundred, and most of the business of developing naval radar and other military electronics will return to the Los Angeles area, where it started.

“It’s hard not to shed a tear,” says former personnel manager Welds of Laguna Hills, who was among the first 200 to arrive at Fullerton and who witnessed the company’s rapid expansion to about 3,000 employees by 1962.

Mayor Catlin was fresh from the Navy when he interviewed with Hughes in Fullerton in 1961. As a Navy officer who had worked in anti-submarine warfare, Catlin was hired almost immediately at a salary of about $15,000.

“The quality of research was superb,” Catlin says, “and we did a lot of improvising.”

In those days, Catlin recalls, “it was very foggy because of the farmland. The 91 Freeway was not complete, neither was the 405. We had to haul electronics equipment to Long Beach, so what we did was put the equipment in a steel fabricated house and picked it up on a truck to transport it. It worked very well.”

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The good times for Hughes workers soured in the ‘70s. With major defense cuts in 1970, the aerospace industry experienced a dramatic downturn and the Hughes’ Fullerton plant was hit as hard as anyone: 3,000 of its 8,000 employees were laid off.

By the late ‘70s, however, the plant landed a series of international air-defense contracts, which offset its dismal opportunities in the United States. Defense spending remained relatively low until the 1980s buildup begun during the Reagan Administration, and by 1986 Hughes’ Fullerton employee roster had swollen to a record 14,500.

But shortly thereafter, the company began to downsize. “We could see the downturn coming,” a company spokesman says.

As military contracts began drying up in the early ‘90s, coinciding with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Hughes plant continued its plan, begun in the ‘80s, of diversifying into such non-military areas as air traffic control systems. This year it contracted to take one of its military communication systems and apply it to improve the capacity and efficiency of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

But that’s little consolation to retired Hughes veteran Ray Turner, who bemoans the plant’s closure.

“I feel pretty sad,” he says, adding that Orange County aerospace “has taken terrible blows. There was a nucleus of highly talented people here and all that talent is jobless. Where can you go to work? It’s the unemployment line or McDonald’s and K mart or whatever. But that’s existence money, not living money.”

And then there is Turner’s son, Danny, who works in transportation at Hughes, to be concerned about: “He’ll probably end up biting the dust.”

Ironically, this week marks Danny Turner’s 24th anniversary with Hughes.

“I feel a great deal of anxiety,” Danny Turner says. “I just feel that it’s going to be 24 years and I’m going to be back out on the job market looking for another job and I don’t really think in today’s economy I’m going to find anything as good as I’ve got now.”