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Transcribed by: Jonah W (2009)
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I had the best possible job because we went from Swatch to Sauberg then to Vienna. And then I was asked while we were in Vienna, if I would be interested in taking over as an information and education officer of the forty-second division. And I said well what does that involve and they said you would be in charge of the education program for future situation where were going to have GIs' from Bavaria and Austria to come to a school were going to set up. So I had my office in this building on Mozart square, lived in a posh hotel called the, cant think of the name of the hotel, anyway it was only a few blocks away from where I worked. I had my jeep and I would go down to Zelonce where we took over a hotel and made a school out of it and called it Rainbow University. And it was also a ski resort in the winter and a summer resort and so I really learned to ski by going up the cable car up to the top of the mountain. There was another hotel up there. And we would ski down the trail and get on the cable car and go back up. So that was a posh assignment to say the least. But, I decided that in July of 1946 I would come home because I wanted to back to school. I had really by letters with a girl I met when I was in Oklahoma who in the forty-second division she lived North of the camp I was in camp Gruber Oklahoma. And met her there and so I kind of committed to her so, indeed we were married and when I got back in Tacoma Washington. And we went back to Southern California, when we were married. And lived in North Hollywood and then I was asked if I wanted to move over to an apartment on the campus of UCLA. And I did and that’s where I finished my schooling at UCLA and went into the work force, as a test engineer at Utility Appliance Corporation in Los Angles.
And that was a terrible job because I was testing heaters in the summer and air conditioners in the winter, terrible. So, I got an offer to go to Lockheed in Burbanknand I went there and I was a drafts men working on constellation passenger airliners, and that was a good job. But, then I had put my application in at Aero Jet in Azusa California and that’s where I learned rocketry. I was a test engineer on rocket engines. And then I was asked if I would be interested in going to Jet Propulsion Lab by a fellow I had worked for who had transferred to Jet Propulsion Lab, JPL. And that’s where I became a rocket scientist, designing and putting together spacecrafts. And I being an expert in rocket propulsion I really was involved in unmanned spacecraft at JPL. My first job there was on the Surveyor, which landed on the moon. Five out of the seven that were launched landed on the moon in various places. And this was a program to preclude Apollo where men were to land on the moon, but there was a professor at Arizona State, Kipper was his name. And he claimed that you cant send men to the moon because there is a layer of dust 15 feet think and it would just swallow up any men that stepped out of their space craft. We sent the Surveyors there and of course it told him that there was no such thing. So Apollo became then I went back to California, left JPL my last job, let me back track a little bit.
Went back to California and my first wife and I departed company and then Marge and I worked together at Aero Jet, before I went to JPL and so, I looked her up after the divorce from Sally. And so, we became great friends and then I left after going from Aero Jet to JPL and working on those several spacecraft. I took a job at Lockheed in Sunnyvale and I was working on a HOE, Homing Overlay Experiment, which was a device to knock down a supposed Soviet re-entry vehicle from Icbm. And we were able to build this device, rocket powered and the test was to launch a supposed ICBM from Vandenberg Air Force Base to Kwajalein Atoll and launch this device to knock down this re-entry vehicle, which it did. It was quite a program, then because I was commuting from, I moved to Monterey then. I was commuting from to Sunny Vale and that was getting a little old. And so, I said I'm going to leave Lockheed and they said you can’t do that your right in the middle of the HOE program and I said well watch me. So, they gave me the opportunity to become a consultant. And so, I consulted for Laukid for a while then, Marge and I formed our own consulting firm called Maryn Consulting, Inc. And she was at that time, some times a president of a company here in Monterey called Prologue. She started out as the financial officer of the company and then became president and then there was a falling out there so she left. And we formed our company and she did some consulting with start up companies and was very instrumental in helping companies in treble. There are a lot of difficulties in particularly start up companies and also in churches of all things. In fact our church here in Pacific Grove, there were a bunch of people making trouble in the church. Most of them were in the Quire and they were giving the Pasture during his sermon the finger behind his back. And so, she corralled all these people and just told them what they were doing and that everybody knows what your doing and the church got rid of most of them. And in fact they left because they were pointed and told that they were no longer desired at the church. And she did this in a couple of other churches and start up companies.
And then in 1985 I had gone back to JPL as a consultant and but they had a limited time for a consultant. They said I either had to leave the consulting work there or come back as an employee again. Which I did in the same job I had had a JPL, which was a propulsion ops. manager, operations manager and we put the Galileo spacecraft together and shipped it to Florida. And Marge and I went to Florida in 1985 and I was in preparation with my engineers to put the propulsion system together and test it and put it on the spacecraft and get it aboard the shuttle, to be launched in May of 1986. Unfortunately January 28th of 1986, Challenger blew up and just killed our program and all the other programs for a long, long time. Had to ship the Galileo spacecraft back to California. It wasn’t launched then until 1991, and it took six years to get to Jupiter whereas it would have been two years if we could have launched in 1986. But, it did a great job looking at the several big moons Io, Ganymede, Cellist, and Europa. Found out that that Io was the most volcanic body in the solar system. It has something like eleven active volcanoes on it so that was interesting. Then since we couldn’t do really anything I left Florida in June in 1986 and went back to Fort Aero Space that I had been with as a consultant worked there from June of 86-1991; I guess it was. I guess my last consulting job was 1992 and so, I retired. And I've been a retiree ever since, living here. Not too shabby.
That kind of brings me up to now. Yeah Marge and I both had three. I had three children with Sally. Shelly, Claudia, and Jimmy. Claudia was a dancer and a singer and she is now an entertainer, she goes on various gigs at various places. Her husband is a stand-up comedian and he goes all over the world and his name is Dick Hardwick. And they were married, let’s see how long ago, and can’t think of it, anyway. They live in Fullerton California, my daughter Shelly, who was first born lives in Leesburg Virginia, she’s a computer expert and she works for a company that sends her out to start information programs at various organizations. She went to Scotland on one trip and she goes to Canada and everywhere else. And then jimmy is the youngest, who is a musician, he lives in Phoenix Arizona and he is now writing scores for movies. One of which was a documentary of the 101st helicopter Brigade it has such a great deal of trouble in Iraq. And the person that wanted to take movies of several situations in Iraq, his name was Eric Simone, learned about Jimmy. He had wanted to hire more famous score writers, but they wanted to be left alone. And Eric wanted to be involved in the creation of this score. So, he found out about Jimmy, so Jimmy did the score for it. That’s our bird clock, sorry about that. The name of the movie is Desert Sky, it is really a great movie and the music is great. And then he wrote a score for the Hoax, which was, you may have heard of the Phoenix lights that in people in Phoenix saw this circle of lights in the sky. And so, this couple I guess, out fitted a helicopter with bright lights and they wanted to help people get over the idea that they were viewing an UFO during the Phoenix lights. And so, this movie is about this helicopter trying to get the people to know when the thing landed, that it wasn’t a UFO.
