Authors: David Beers
My father was fun to be with at the Reno air races, fun to be with, too, on the several backpacking trips we made in those years. We went with another Lockheed father and his two boys, hiking all day in Desolation Valley north of Lake Tahoe. “We don’t dilly dally in Desolation Valley!” my father liked to joke as we made our way through the granite and pines. When we reached our lake at the end of the day, my father baited my fishing hook with salmon eggs from a jar labeled “Potsky’s Balls o’ Fire.” “Ready or notskys, here come Potsky’s!” he shouted as I cast my line. The other Lockheed boys had that feral happiness I recognized in my swim teammates. They hiked a dozen steep miles without showing any strain and upon arrival caught trout with their bare hands in a stream behind camp. I did not feel much in common with them, but it did not matter because my father and I could walk together and talk about the books he had
been reading and how great it was to be in such a setting so magnificent and ancient as the High Sierra.
On the drives home, whether from the Reno air races or a backpacking trip, my father would seem for long stretches of road to have run out of topics and words, though at some point he always offered me the same advice. Working for a big corporation meant a life of compromise, he would say. I should avoid taking on too many obligations too soon, he would add.
B
y the summer I was to turn fourteen, I could no longer doubt that the children of feral happiness would always be different from me. Now they were growing ripply muscles in their thighs and chest and arms. Their backs were ever broadening V’s and their blond hair, tinged an enviable green by chlorine and sun, curled with fussless perfection on the napes of their necks. Some of these kids had grown this way while swimming half the laps I did. And yet there I am in a team photo, my chest still a lattice of bone, my arms crossed with a fist wedged behind each bicep in order to spread the flesh and create the illusion of
some
muscle. At the annual team slumber party, the beautiful boys and girls slipped in and out of each other’s sleeping bags while I snickered with other “B” boys. When the championships rolled around, some “A” swimmers who had quit the team were invited back in order to help Kona Kai get extra points. With little more than a few days’ working out, they swam their “A” times and walked off with medals ahead of me.
Swim team was teaching me, by then, lessons the tribe had not intended. Hard work did not automatically ratchet one to the top of the meritocracy. Rather, the gifted lived there always, and accepted their places with the equanimity of natural aristocrats. My brother, six years younger than me, who had been given the body I wanted, joined the swim team at age six and won virtually every event he attempted over the next three summers before
quitting and going on to be a tennis champion. I saw this, I saw the ever more quizzical looks the beautiful girls gave me, and I made my refuge in sarcasm.
Quickness with words, an instinct for the ironic aside, was my only natural talent, I was beginning to understand. Words felt comfortable in my head, before my eyes, on my tongue, in a way that water never had felt comfortable around my body. My problem was that in the swimming pool, the gift of glib held no currency. With every reach and pull through the water, words came and went, came and went, slipping through my mind, rushing out my nose and mouth in clouds of bubbles. But my teammates, my coach, the clock at the end of the lane, could not care less for my words. The swimming pool was meant to be a zone of raw, blind exertion; that was the cleanliness of it. “Here’s a dime, Hat Rack. Phone someone who cares,” the coach would say to me whenever I’d try to kid him into changing the terms of the workout. What he saw in me, what I was becoming despite my thousands of laps in the swimming pool, was one more skinny, smart-assed teenager. Smart-assedness, in those days, permeated the air like freshly released pollen: smart-ass signs waving in protest (Vietnam: Love It or Leave It), smart-ass stickers stuck on bumpers: (Burn Pot, Not People), a smart-ass name for our President (Tricky Dick). It was as if the country had just discovered the teenager’s tool of subversion, a tool wielded by me with improving confidence.
I had powerful incentive. I was learning how, with the right crack at the right moment, to disarm my father in one of his testy moods. Now when I saw an explosion coming I might move beyond mere surveillance to intervene, might manage my father’s emotions before they could go critical. I could observe his eyebrows gathering and I could say some words that put the eyebrows back where they belonged. My father’s appetite for cynical humor seemed to grow with every book he read, a craving I could satisfy if I chose my words, cuttingly funny words, carefully. If I didn’t, of course, the risks were high. What if, in one of his
moods, my father were to sense that I was making him the
object
of my smart-assed remark?
I
do not with any vividness remember the sight of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon. I know that at 7:56 on the evening of July 20, 1969, my family was together in the family room, most of us crowded onto the yellow Naugahyde couch. But the history-making we saw was a television image, and so it has become, after countless replays, a visual icon that blots out any memory of that first perception. What I remember is the conversation around the event. My father had known Neil Armstrong as a classmate in the aeronautical engineering program at Purdue University. This fact seemed to me a kind of benediction upon my family, and I asked my father all about Neil Armstrong. All my father could recall was that the first man on the moon had been a friendly fellow, low key, happy to drink a beer with my father.
I remember my father’s reaction to his college mate’s now-famous phrase: “That’s one small step for man, but a giant leap for mankind.”
“You don’t say a thing like that spontaneously,” my father said. “Neil got some help. At minimum, he spent weeks working out that line.”
I remember, too, my father saying the Apollo program was an unnecessary risk of human life, a “dog and pony show for the taxpayers.” Satellites, he told me, could do anything a person could do in space and “faster and cheaper.” Indeed, Surveyor I had made a perfect landing on the moon more than three years before, yet America reserved its exultation for Neil Armstrong’s footfall.
I remember my father the next day pointing to an article in the newspaper about people who preferred to believe the moon landing had been faked. “Not that farfetched, really,” my father
said. “The political futures of powerful men are riding on this. They’ve promised the nation it could be done and what if it couldn’t? Would they just shrug and say, ‘Sorry about that, no can do’? Hardly. All you’d need is a big television studio and a few dozen souls willing to go along with the charade for the sake of national security. Not that farfetched at all.”
I remember a moment some weeks later that has become the stuff of legend in our family. Neil Armstrong was back on Earth and out of quarantine. He was in Washington, D.C., making a televised address to politicians. My father was in one of our bathrooms occupied with a fix-it job. “Hal,” my mother called to the back of the house. “Neil Armstrong is giving his speech.”
“Not now, Terry,” my father called back. “I’m deep into this.” And then a pause, and then a wail from my father that was only mostly in jest. “My God!” he said. “How our lives have diverged! Neil Armstrong is being applauded by the President, and I’m staring at the underside of a toilet!”
“This,” President Nixon declared of the lunar landing, “is the greatest week since the beginning of the world, the creation.” My tribe, certainly, assumed Apollo’s success would secure our dominance. Having been placed in charge of the future, we had delivered as promised a man on the moon on television. As scripted by our tribe’s father, Wernher von Braun, the moon shot was to be but a way station on the path to Mars, a warm-up for the building and launching of a “flotilla” of manned spaceships to the red planet.
Yet almost at the moment
Eagle
landed, blue sky icons seemed to lose their mojo powers. Environmentalists, utterly unmoved by the sleek loveliness of the SST, painted it loud and rude, shot it down. The B-70 superbomber program had already crashed in Congress as the antiwar movement challenged the notion that the Pentagon, NASA, or any state authority should be the revered and unchallenged steward of a people’s imagination about the future. Few (except for my tribe) took seriously Vice President Agnew’s call for a Mars mission.
Seventeen weeks after the greatest week since the beginning
of the world, one day after a second successful Apollo mission had returned to Earth, Washington, D.C., was engulfed by more than a quarter of a million dissenting Americans, the largest antiwar demonstration in the nation’s history. Their slogan was “March Against Death.” Citizens across the country were asked to wear black armbands to indicate their support for the moratorium. My father wore a black armband into his place of work at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. A colleague said to him, laughing, “Hey Hal, who died?”
“About fifty thousand Americans and untold Vietnamese,” he answered flatly.
An hour later my father was invited into the office of his supervisor, who informed him that wearing a black armband “around the project” was the sort of thing that could get a man’s “ticket pulled.” My father knew others whose security clearances had been lifted with less explanation; the giving and taking away of secret privilege was itself a secret process. He knew also that with no ticket he would be without a job at Lockheed, and he needed the job. He removed the black armband and returned to his desk.
One year after the greatest week since the beginning of the world, a slowing in weapons spending, coinciding with a slump in commercial jet sales, caused mass aerospace layoffs across the country. California, where the livelihoods of some half a million people were directly tied to aerospace, was hardest hit. On November 1, 1970, when Richard Nixon came to our city of San Jose to campaign for a Republican senator, the nation saw his car pelted with bricks and bottles, saw the President cursed and denounced by demonstrators against the Vietnam War. What did not make television was a group of protesters wearing suits and ties, carrying picket signs with a different message. They were unemployed aerospace workers like Rudy Rider, a married forty-four-year-old engineer with two daughters. “I wouldn’t want to get involved with anything like that,” Rider told a newspaper reporter as the antiwar melee broke out across the street. But he was there to remind politely that “We’re not statistics. When
you’re out of a job, you’re one hundred percent out of a job.” A fellow picketer added, “It’s in Nixon’s lap. Federal dollars put these people in this county and federal dollars should take care of them.”
That was a time when there was a call for a “Cesar Chavez with a Ph.D.” to lead aerospace workers in marches on capitol buildings, a time when several dozen unemployed aerospace workers did march on the California state capitol, vowing to nail a list of demands to Governor Reagan’s mahogany door if he did not see them. “We just want meaningful jobs which will enable us to live a life consistent with human dignity,” read their proclamation. That was a time when some of my father’s peers went from designing satellites to perfecting alloy backpack frames (surely Dad hadn’t been a compatriot of Neil Armstrong’s only to make camping gear!). I remember, while watching the Jetsons suburbanize the Milky Way on TV, reading newspaper stories about out-of-work Lockheed men killing themselves.
That was a time when the tribe clung to hubris nevertheless. One year after the greatest week in the history of the world, members of the blue sky tribe convened the West Coast’s First Aerospace Congress to take up the issue of where next to apply the methods used to conquer the moon. Let us now turn aerospace engineers loose, speakers urged, on the problems of pollution, crime, urban blight, racism, poverty. Let us fix society with systems engineering. It fell to Vernon L. Grose, vice president of Tustin Institute of Technology in Santa Barbara, to counsel some caution. Yes, he saw opportunity in “the list of civil problems … long and getting longer.” But the systems approach works best when human variables are kept to a minimum. “If people could somehow be eliminated from socio-economic problems, the solutions would be quite straightforward,” he offered in the paper he delivered. “However, because people play such a dominant role in the problems, optimism becomes reserved.”
Eighteen months after the greatest week since the beginning of the world,
Aviation Week and Space Technology
was urging America to get back to the only business that aerospace companies
really were cut out to do: the making of weapons and space vehicles. The year 1970, concluded the journal’s editors, had been “the gloomiest year in decades” and they knew who to blame: the sorts of people who wore black armbands, barbarians against the tribe. They blamed “the mounting assault on technology by a strange coalition of political opportunists, disgruntled youth, ecologists, and advocates of the social welfare state.”
That was a time when my father ended an argument with my mother by flinging a wineglass into the corner of the kitchen where it burst into shards. A time also when my father kicked at a bathroom door, leaving a splintery crack he found impossible to patch. That was a time when my father would sulk all weekend long, increasingly immune to my words, often angered all the more by them, by my “attitude,” by my “tone.” I remember him one day grabbing me by my T-shirt, lifting me off the ground and against the wall of the house, saying he was sick and tired of my smart-assed remarks, raging into my face as the hot stucco prickled my back.
T
he summer of 1972, the summer I turned fifteen, was to be my final summer on the swim team. In June, Nixon operatives were caught bugging the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate complex. In August, on the day after the United States withdrew its last combat unit from Vietnam, B-52s pounded that land with the most intensive twenty-four-hour bombing raid of the war. I floated through that summer on glints of sunlight and whiffs of chlorine, dreaming of sex with beautiful green-haired girls but having sex only with myself. My duties at home were minimal: keep a neat enough room, keep the grass mowed. Most of the time I swam and played tennis and Ping-Pong. Nixon’s sending of American players to China had made Ping-Pong a craze of sorts. There was a Ping-Pong table at Kona Kai where I would play for hours with swim teammates. My father had bought a table for our backyard deck, where my
brother and I would slap the plastic ball back and forth endlessly, perfecting our top-spins and slices. At the beginning of the summer my father had been able to defeat me handily, but as the season wore on I did better and better against him.