mch

4 OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
hotcakes but the Air Force needed more than we could supply
them, so Ryan lost one contract after another within only a few
weeks, something that is typical of the American way of business.
As a result Ryan was in financial difficulty.
It became clear
that I would have to look for another job. Since Convair, the
only aerospace company in San Diego besides Ryan, by now
faced even greater economic difficulties, I had to go up to Los
Angeles to find a suitable position. The job situation was much
better there, but I did not want to move nearly a hundred miles
north to Los Angeles for several reasons. First of all, Los Angeles
is not a city like San Diego. Los Angeles is a chain of industrial
suburbs stretched in line over sixty miles and nobody likes to live
there if he can help it. Besides, we had just bought a brand new
home in San Diego, with a magnificent view of the bay and we
had no wish whatever to go and live in the notorious smog of
L.A.
So it was decided that my wife and my three sons, together
with our huge Newfoundland retriever, Katanga, would stay in
San Diego and that I would drive to Los Angeles on Monday
and return on Friday, as many of my friends had been doing. It
was far from my ideal way of life, but what else could I do?
It so happened that at the precise moment when Ryan and
Convair were having their great difficulties in San Diego, North
American Aviation was building a new gigantic aerospace plant
for 30,000 employees in Downey, a southern suburb of Los Angeles,
in the hope that it would receive the Apollo development
and construction contract from the United States Government,
the space project whose goal was to land a man on the moon.
To start building such vast production facilities before receiving
a contract seems foolhardy but very American, because how
could you hope to get the contract if you didn't have the factory
first to show to the customer? But North American had no
doubts that it would get the bid. The company had cemented
its relations well with Lyndon Johnson, at that time the Vice
President of the United States and in charge of the space program.
At the very time when the new Downey plant was completed,
it
was announced that North American had submitted the best
technical layout for both development and production of the