A Star-Crossed Assembly Line

They must have felt like demigods then, the slide-rule boys who drove to work down Lakewood Boulevard into parking lots as endless as the orange groves they once were, walking into a building that measured a million square feet--walking into the future.

To come to work on a July morning in 1963 and see standing right there, right there on the shop floor, America’s space warriors, the haloed heroes of the age, John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gordo Cooper, Neil Armstrong . . . and then, on another July day six years later, to watch as that same Neil Armstrong climbs out of a craft you built and presses his foot into the dead gray powder of the moon--the freaking moon!

Not every piece of hardware that issued forth from our armories and foundries and assembly lines in Southern California’s half-century as the Arsenal of Democracy West was intended to blow up, vaporize or splatter the other guy. We forget that sometimes.

Here in Downey, what is now Rockwell International’s Space Systems Division produced its share of kick-ass missiles like the Hound-Dog and Navaho. But here, too, was the world’s biggest “clean room,” and the water tank to simulate ocean splashdowns of those pointy Apollo modules that Downey made in such numbers that they called the place Teepee Village.

Men at Cape Canaveral sent the craft up, and men in Houston called the shots, but it was the sheds and labs and chambers of Downey that crafted the Apollo ships, and then that fleet of space trucks called space shuttles--Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavor. It was Downey that riveted the rungs on the ladder into space.

So how was work today, dear?

Honey, you wouldn’t believe it.

*

There is a place on Lakewood Boulevard in Downey that a historian has garlanded with phrases like “high tech energetic, optimistic, forward-looking.” That place is not Rockwell. It is McDonald’s.

On Dec. 15, the oldest surviving McDonald’s burger stand, an icon of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, will open once again. Just about everything will be as it was in 1953, except the prices.

Nine days earlier, the Rockwell site will have awakened to its new incarnation as Boeing North American. It has been re-badged before: Smith’s Emsco Aircraft, which hoped to build a plane with folding wings to fit in the average garage, to Vultee to Convair to North American to Rockwell and now Boeing North American. The property is one of those Cold War creatures--part business, part government.

For all its corrugated metal sheds and windowless aspects--not unlike a movie studio, really--the site by any name came to feel as permanent a part of town as the Downey Cemetery. At its apex, 30 years back, 25,000 people worked here.

The bloom is off the space age; Star Trek movies may get bigger budgets, and bigger audiences, than shuttle launches. NASA had to give up something to the budgeteers: the Ames research center in Northern California, JPL in Pasadena, or its stake in Downey.

It took an act of Congress to end-run the arcana of federal surplus land laws, but the city of Downey will get to buy 68 of the government’s 166 acres, with no money down and 20 years to pay. Already, the city is using planning department language--Parcels 5 and 6 for an industrial park for jobs, Parcel 4 for offices for the space programs still on site.

Downey’s city manager, Gerald M. Caton, is an aerospace brat; his father worked here for 28 years, wartime to warp-time. On launch days, Gerald got up early to watch. On Family Day, Gerald came to marvel and to wonder. And now the eternal guns-and-butter quandary is his. He’s gone so far as to talk to the Smithsonian people about the dream of a museum--at least a memorial--but “we have the reality that this area needs jobs now. . . .”

*

The most shameless booster in the most Babbitty burg in America would blush to take on the mission statement that the formidable Jean Dowd has set as hers: “To preserve and protect America’s most historic site of the 20th century.” She means the Rockwell site, “the birthplace of America’s space program. It’s a magical spot.”

After 25 years overseas, the teacher and video producer has come home to Downey to kick civic butt with all the thrust of one of those Navaho rockets. Forget the industrial park, she scoffs. Small potatoes. Think big. Think millions. On that same surplus land, raise up Space City. A space museum and library, a visitors’ techno-center, and finally a virtual reality space theme park--educational, entertaining, and close to two airports and three freeways, to Knott’s and to Disneyland. If there’s room in this country for two Disneylands, there’s room for Houston’s space park and this one, too--on the spot where it began.

Jean Dowd’s plan holds both ardor and culture shock. After decades in parts of the world that are mindful of their history, she has returned to a region that is often quick to plow its past under, pave it over, and then panic, and hang plaques on the coffee shops and burger stands that are left.