<Begin Segment 12>

TI: Why did you leave Convair?

HM: Well, Convair got themselves into a huge amount of trouble. In the wind tunnel records that we used to put on, then used to say, "You have to put the thing down in pencil." And it was IBM cards. And then like we would be working on one model for a couple of hours and then another model because we were in an instrumentation group. And we would get that thing calibrated for that tunnel or a given condition. And then we would work on the model that we would be placing in there next. So we would be appropriating maybe anywhere from one hour to maybe three hours per day for a given project. So we were shuffling between the military programs as well as civilian programs, which was internally funded. And we did this all in pencil. And I used to keep my monthly record file of all the programs I was charging to.

And one day we had an air force audit. They said, "Everybody that's working in this area please stop what you're doing, and we want you to bring out your monthly record of charges." And all of us did that. About a week later, they said over the PA system, "Cease all work on F-106, 106C, advanced version of the such-and-such, the navy aircraft, and terminate all work from now." And then the newspaper came out and says it's a huge scandal. They had been shuffling around these charges. And the navy -- I mean, the air force at that point shut off everything on the F-106 program. They came to a screeching halt. The only airplanes that are to be built are the ones on the assembly line, no more. The contract was terminated right there. All hell broke loose at that point.

TI: Because what the audit showed was that Convair was overcharging the air force?

HM: Yes, for working on commercial projects. That's why they were putting it in pencil. I thought somewhat funny, but then we never questioned --

TI: Right. Because, just, I mean, for the viewer, I mean, in sciences and engineering, you're always taught to do it in pen because it's a record.

HM: Yes. Yeah, it's supposed to be in pen. But anyway, that completely terminated all the military programs, almost overnight. And people were indicted. They were charged in court. And the air force brought the, the hammer down. And so people were starting to get laid off two weeks subsequent to that. And then the next thing that happened was the Howard Hughes airplane programs went from 120 airplanes down to 20 airplanes. And so by that time we were starting to roll these airplanes out the door. And Howard Hughes got into money problems. And he couldn't pay for the airplanes. So he said, "I refuse to accept these airplanes because they cannot meet performance specs that we agreed to." And so he put the Pinkerton guards around these airplanes, and he wouldn't allow even the Convair people to even get inside the airplanes. And anyway, that, that, the employment figure went from 22,000 down to 1,500 in one fell swoop. That was for the airplane part of the General Dynamics.

The other thing that was going on was the Atlas ICBM program. And they were building up manpower there. So, well we had done the wind tunnel tests for the Atlas Missile, and a missile is a pretty simply vehicle to do wind tunnel tests on. But that's what we had done previously. And we were somewhat involved with some of the instrumentation functions because we wanted to match up between the flight characteristics versus the stuff we got in wind tunnel data. We used to kind of correlate the information. So anyway, they assigned all of us in bulk to support the failures at Cape Canaveral. And it just happened that we were having one failure after another. And because it's such a marginally designed vehicle for what it's supposed to do, the failure rate is extremely high for that kind of situation. You get a big gust of wind, that, that's the end of the vehicle.

TI: So you were doing this after they had made the cuts, the major cuts at...

HM: Yeah.

TI: ...Convair?

HM: The wind tunnel didn't...

TI: So you were there?

HM: ...get hit very badly because we had ongoing programs. We had to support Edwards Air Force Base on some of the --

TI: So although the employment went down to like 1,500, you were still there.

HM: Still working at the wind tunnel, yeah. In fact, there was higher demand in the wind tunnel now because of the, the malfunction analysis that we were performing for the Atlas vehicle than we had during the normal time period. So everything in the wind tunnel was very busy. So we were recruiting guys that were being laid off, and bringing into our wind tunnel instrumentation area. And then, then that became a problem because here they're shipping us in bulk, like five and ten-man groups down to the cape to try to figure what's going on down there. And so it was a very busy time period for us.

And after they got those problems resolved on the cape, then they decided to ship us as part of the deployment group for the Vandenberg operations. And the first wing of Atlas Missiles was supposed to be stationed at Vandenberg. And we went up there to see if we could get the thing supported for the air force acceptance. And anyway, during one of those time periods -- they were getting pretty lenient to bring families up to Santa Maria for living quarters because we were staying up at Vandenberg for maybe a month at a whack. And they had all kinds of problems at Vandenberg because here it was a different kind of installation from Florida, and it was supposed to be an operational squadron, and the Air Force people were involved. And so everything became a mix-up up there. And then they were having failures all over the place. And Kruschev was going down to Disneyland from San Francisco after they had that UN meeting, and our orders were at that time we were going to make one of the Atlas take off at the time the train is going past Point Arguelo, which is the railroad line that goes right on the coastline down to the LA area. And we were supposed to launch that vehicle when the train was going, with Kruschev on it, down that link. And so everything was a panic. So we got people on top of people trying to get the dumb thing operational.

And anyway, it was during one of these crazy activities, a guy I used to work with, he got so mad at this supervisor because we had been cannibalizing other vehicles to get the equipment put on the one that we were preparing to launch. He got so mad that he socked him in the jaw, and all hell broke loose. It was really a hectic situation. I've never seen an operation that was that hectic in my life. But anyway, he got fired on the spot. And we didn't get the vehicle launched. It just didn't go. But after that whole process I started looking at my job, and well, this is little bit too much. They send us up to Vandenberg and here they...

TI: Right.

HM: ...put us into these different areas that we don't belong in, and they make us work like twenty hours at a whack. I just got so tired of it that I decided well, maybe I better start doing something else. Well, there was a bunch of us that, we used to do instrumentation. And some of these guys got into areas where they needed to do special equipment for calibration purposes, like you had to know how much pneumatic system efficiencies were in the missile. And they had nothing to do these calibrations, one of the guys that was in this design group for the Atlas Missile, he said, "Well, let's have it made outside." And he said, "Hey, let's form a company that can make this stuff. And we could do a better job than the suppliers that they have around here. They don't have the smarts to do it, they don't have the equipment to do it. We could do a better job." So bunch of us got together, and that's when we started this X-Onics Corporation.

TI: And how big a group was this, roughly?

HM: Well, we had, initially six guys, but it expanded to about fifteen. And --

TI: And where did the money come from to do this? Did you all chip in to --

HM: No. We had a bunch of contacts with the La Jolla bankers. They had some guys in La Jolla that had had -- it's like the Micropho -- Microsoft reservoir of funds, very similar to it. But these guys had liquid capital. They had it available. And so anyway, they set up the initial money for X-Onics Corporation. And by that time I was ready to quit Convair because of all this monkey business up at Vandenberg and everywhere else. After we finished Vandenberg then they sent us out to a place of, out in the boonies.

TI: Now, how do you feel? Because, I'm thinking from a family perspective, now did you have your, were your son and daughter born at this point?

HM: Well, the daughter was born, yeah. The oldest daughter was born.

TI: Okay.

HM: And then Robert was born at...

TI: Where you're at --

HM: Yeah, in San Diego. He was born at Scripps. And anyway, we had them all up at Santa Maria because they would allow us to bring the family up there. And they weren't school age, so it was great for my ex-wife because she know -- they used to pal around with all their friends and all the families that were up there. And it was just a great vacation time for them. They used to go around to different parks. And they had a good time.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.