<Begin Segment 18>

BN: So after you graduated... you graduated in what year?

SM: In '56.

BN: '56, and then you came down here?

SM: I got married and then I came down here.

BN: So your wife joined you. And where did you live then?

SM: I lived in a place called Mar Vista, right adjacent to Santa Monica.

BN: And then how long did you work at Douglas?

SM: Total time including Boeing was forty-two years.

BN: But you moved around to different places, correct?

SM: I started engineering in Santa Monica working on airplanes, worked on rockets. Then I went to their field station testing facility in New Mexico and we lived in a small town in New Mexico while I was there for four years helping develop the rockets. That was interesting because my mother-in-law advised my wife, "Don't go. Your skin's going to dry up, you're going to turn brown, don't go." But she said, "No, I got to go." It's a good thing, because she developed some very longtime friends in a small town.

BN: What was the town?

SM: Called Las Cruces, New Mexico.

BN: Okay. And then when were your kids born?

SM: One child was born in San Francisco in '57, and the other child was born at New Mexico in '61.

BN: And then from New Mexico you came back?

SM: I came back to Santa Monica, then to Culver City, we had another office in Culver City, they were there for a number of years. And then I went to, they asked me to go to Washington, D.C. to be head of their department in the Washington office working on the space program. So that was a really fascinating time of my career. My main objective was to learn how Washington works because we had so much business with the government. And I learned that it took quite a while.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.