Blue Sky Dream

The unusual form of this book leaves me indebted to three kinds of persons: members of my family who not only gave support but entrusted me, in a sense, with their lives; colleagues who shared insights as I wrote; and authors of works about the milieus I describe. “A communal memoir” is the phrase my fine editor, Bill Thomas, uses for what has resulted. Well, quite a community (one so large that to identify every member is impossible) deserves credit here.

I say thank you, profoundly, to my father and mother for their openness to this project. My father likes to joke, “I wish when you were born I had noticed the label warning: ‘Everything you say can and may be used against you.’ ” This book, however, would never have been attempted without the willing participation of Hal and Terry Beers, and never for a second have I taken for granted this gift from them. Thanks as well to my beloved sisters and brother, Marybeth MacLean, Maggie Beers, and Dan Beers. And an eternal thank you to Deirdre Kelly, my wife and best friend, whose intelligence and honesty and caressing wit have made this book (as with all things good in our lives) possible.

Richard Rodriguez encouraged me years ago, over many lunches, to think in terms of a memoir. That he who wrote so masterfully of his own formation decided to take an interest in mine remains an inspiration to me. I thank Molly Friedrich for her surehandedness as agent and advisor. I thank Bill Thomas for his perfect way with my variable psyche and prose. For giving me much of their time to help me make sense of the changing technological and social landscape, I owe these brilliant people: Gary Chapman of the 21st Century Project in Austin, Texas; Ann Markusen of the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics at Rutgers University; Lenny Siegel of the Pacific Studies Center in Mountain View, California; Peter Calthorpe of Calthorpe Associates, San Francisco, California. For supplying me invaluable help along the way, I am grateful to Kathryn Olney, James Glave, David Kirp, and Peter Neushul. For their companionship and unfailing interest in my sanity, I thank Bill Richardson and Wallace Robinson.

A heartfelt thank you also to the gracious and creative people at Doubleday, especially Marly Rusoff, Sandee Yuen, Janet Hill, Jennifer Daddio, and most especially Jacqueline LaPierre.

While it is too daunting to cite every article and book informing what I have written, I do wish to list these most useful road maps. (Any wrong turns I may have taken are my own responsibility, of course.)
Barons of the Sky
by Wayne Biddle, for aircraft industry history;
Arming the Heavens
by Jack Manno, for early aerospace and Wernher von Braun; … 
The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age
by Walter A. McDougall, for strategies of Cold War leaders and spy satellite history; “The Genesis of Silicon Valley” by Annalee Saxenian and
The New Book of California Tomorrow
edited by John Hart, for the development of Santa Clara Valley;
Crabgrass Frontier
by Kenneth T. Jackson and
Redesigning the American Dream
by Dolores Hayden, for the form, function, and growth of suburbs;
The Rise
of the Gunbelt
by Ann Markusen et al., for the impetus behind aerospace settlements;
The New Alchemists
by Dirk Hanson and
Fire in the Valley
by Paul Frieberger and Michael Swaine, for the history of Steve Wozniak and the personal computer revolution;
Behind the Silicon Curtain
by Dennis Hayes, for the culture of Silicon Valley’s boom.

Portions of this book have been published in different form in
Harper’s, Mother Jones
, and the magazine of the
San Francisco Examiner.
To protect privacy, the “Gianninis” and the “O’Mearas” of
Chapter 5
are pseudonyms.

PROLOGUE
 TAIL-END CHARLIE
 

O
n the wall of a hallway in the stucco four-bedroom ranchette where I grew up, the home of my mother and father, there hangs a family totem typical of our tribe: a neat grouping of twenty-seven photographs. The style of expression may well strike you as naive, even primitive, but don’t be fooled. Beneath the crude Kodak colors lie wry paradoxes, ominous contradictions, the dense mythology of a people who believed themselves without myth.

Some help, then, in deciphering.

Note, first of all, that just about every one of these pictographs is an homage to one of us, the four children. We are immaculately backhanding tennis volleys. We are holding blue ribbons as we stand grinning in Speedo swimsuits. We are laughing without front teeth under First Communion veils. We are wearing scholars’ robes over surfers’ shorts as we reach for our many college diplomas. We have been told by department store photographers
to stand all together just so, to radiate relaxed love, and without fail every time we have done it.

We know how to make it look easy, don’t we?
A tribe’s teaching, instilled early.

Do you see how comfortably familiar we find the glare of sunshine, even as it seems to punish those other people, the visiting relatives from places strange and ancient with names like Rock Island, Illinois? Look how they stand there next to us, squinting and glistening in their stiff, wrong clothes. Sunshine burns its presence into every one of these pictures, even into those holiday snaps taken at night around the dinner table, because in every picture the skin of us, the four children, is freckled or browned or rosily peeling or all of these mottled together by our daily doses of ultraviolet.
A tribe’s markings, read as blessings.

And yet, in no picture is the light so bright as when it washes over the two people in this one portrait, over here, hanging just around the hallway corner. These two people, off by themselves, are my mother and father when they were simply Terry and Hal, on their wedding day.

As you see, this pictograph is unlike the others in that it is black and white with the lush, deep tones of a movie still. It was taken on April 21, 1956, in Corpus Christi, Texas, a place we, the four children, have never seen.

What we’ve been told of Corpus Christi is that back then it was a place very much of its time. It was one of any number of Sunbelt way stations where young men and women, fleeing flat prospects in cold climates, would find themselves for a brief while, would meet on a beach or at a party, would tend to fall quickly in love, and a few months later, without a lot of agonizing, would be married. So united, the two would hurry on to even more temperate climes and lives constructed around the promise of us, the four children—all of this accomplished with the grateful participation of the United States government.
A tribe’s legend, taken on faith.

As you see, the artificial light in this wedding picture has made my mother’s dress, white lace and chiffon, all the more
white, setting off her slender tanned arms and full black hair and ivory smile.

As you see, too, the light has made my father’s uniform, the whites of a Lieutenant Junior Grade, all the more white, setting off his lean tanned face, his own full black hair, his own ivory smile.

The cake is bright white, the table cloth is bright white. All that is behind is plunged by the powerful flash into blackness. Into invisibility.

My mother, notice, looks just the slightest bit shy, as if she might suddenly lower overwhelmed eyes. Not my father. He looks proud. He is proud of his new bride and of how his life appears to be forming at age twenty-three. There is something else, I happen to know, that makes the groom, Hal before he was my father, stare straight into the burst of light so assuredly on this day. He is particularly proud to be wearing, pinned to his white officer’s uniform, the gold wings of a naval aviator.
A tribe’s talisman, sign of the elect.

W
hat did it mean to be a twenty-three-year-old naval aviator in 1956? This you will need to know should you want to give the pictographs their deeper reading. In answer, I can do no better than relate the tale my father tells, an adventure story. His tale concerns the time he was selected to set a speed record in the fighter jet the nation had just given him and taught him to fly, the F9F-8 Cougar.

At the time, jets were a recent enough phenomenon that the F9F-8 Cougar could trace a direct lineage to one of the very earliest. As the Second World War closed, the engineers of the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation had borrowed from the catalog of standard propeller plane shapes—triangle tail, bullet nose, wings sticking out from the fuselage at right angles—and into this collage they had tried mixing the recently invented jet engine. Their product, named the F9F-2 Panther, had proven
workable enough that the Navy bought some, and so, over the next decade, the engineers tinkered with their design, adding power, fuel capacity, eventually getting around to sweeping the wings back in such a way as to inspire boys and Detroit automakers. By 1956, their evolved result, Panther metamorphosed into sleeker Cougar, had the look of the jet age thoroughly arrived.