<Begin Segment 18>

RP: After you graduated the University of Nevada, you ended up going to San Francisco and working for the Navy or...

AI: Yeah, the Navy shipyards. I was on interior communications there, working on refitting ships to, to fix up their communication system and whatnot. So, and I guess shipyards is gone now. It doesn't exist anymore. They got rid of a lot of facilities.

RP: Which... do you know which shipyard it was?

AI: San Francisco Naval Shipyard.

RP: San Francisco Naval Shipyard.

AI: Yeah.

RP: Okay.

AI: It's the one as you're going across the Bay Bridge, off to the left you could see a giant bridge crane and that was the Navy shipyards at that point.

RP: What type of ships did you work on?

AI: Oh, gosh. Destroyers, aircraft carriers, cruisers, missile ships, even a ship that was used to collect samples from nuclear explosions and stuff like that. But I only worked there, what, a year and a half and then I went into the service.

RP: You said you ended up, you were a twenty-one year old in the service ordering twenty year old veterans around?

AI: Yeah, yeah. I was probably, probably older than twenty-one because by the time I graduated it was '55, I was, what, thirty-three... oh, I was twenty-two. I guess, huh. Yeah. But, yeah, I, when I became a second lieutenant I was assigned a position as a, a commanding officer of the housekeeping outfit that, and housekeeping outfit I worked at... I was at White Sands missile range. And there they had... it was a tri-service facility, army, navy, marines, and the army was responsible for doing the recovery of the drones and the, and the missiles in the area. And they were stationed at Holloman Air Force -- White Sands was down at the bottom of the range, a rectangular range, 40 by 100 miles, and Holloman Air Force base was up on the eastern side, up about the middle. And there they had a, what they called a detachment of recovery people. And there were, there were radar stations that were manned by the army and a few other things. And so I was responsible for that, those kind of people. And so, I had, I had to sign up for the property. And when I'd do inventory. One of the keys was you had to have a good supply sergeant that was able to cover your butt in case you end up with shortages and things like that. And fortunately I had a staff sergeant that was a good supply sergeant. And the master sergeant was, the non-commissioned officer in charge was a real, real good veteran army person that took real good care of me. So I was fortunate. I didn't, didn't try to lord over my power on him or anything. So, it was, it was quite an experience. Part of that job was to... at the time, the army paid everybody in cash. And so I used to tap, each month I have to travel down to White Sands to the, to the bank down there, whatever, to finance... pick-up thirty, forty thousand dollars worth of cash and, and drive it back up to White Sands. And, needless to say, that was a little bit unnerving, but we, I had a pistol and I brought the sergeant with me and he had a rifle and a carbine. So we felt... that was about a 40 mile trip so you're pretty vulnerable for that period of time. But, that was, that was it for my experience in the army. Yeah.

RP: So what did you test at Aerojet?

AI: Oh, Aerojet?

RP: You said you were in Tennessee testing.

AI: Yeah, well, Aerojet was responsible for the Titan, the first and second stage of the Titan missile. Oh, and gosh they, just here recently they finally closed out the Titan contract. It was a fifty-year contract. And one of the last jobs I had for Aerojet was because of the, some of the products that we used was toxic... like we had, we had a what's called the skirt and that's the, that's the thing that directs the flame of the, of the rocket. And that was made out of asbestos. And so of course that was a no-no so they had to change all that to a different, a different material and our job in Tennessee was to test that. And in order to test rockets, by the time, by the time the second stage gets up, it's up at 100,000 feet, the atmosphere is rarified. Well, in Tennessee they have a facility that's capable of attaining that altitude of 100,000 feet. And what they do because they're right next to the Tennessee Valley Authority, they use, they're able to use all the power that's available to them to drive these huge fans to suck this big chamber down, down to about a half a pound per square inch. That was their normal, 14.7 (PSU), bring it down to half a pound. And then they use these big steam ejectors that come out and suck it down the rest of the way. Now, once the engine fires, the engine fires and it creates its own vacuum so they don't need all that stuff anymore. But it was a huge... it was 250 feet deep, it was about 50, 75 feet in diameter, chamber that this engine stood in. And we conducted a duration test, it was 400 seconds or something like that. Setting some kind of a world record for altitude testing. Yeah that, that was one... Aerojet made what's called the Peacekeeper Missile. It was a ten-warhead nuclear missile and everybody thinks that was awful that I... to this day I truly think that that's what helped stop the Cold War. 'Cause we just went out and broke the Russians. They went, they went broke before we did. So, my kids admonish me for being a war mongerer but I say, "Look, it saved us from a nuclear holocaust." So, anyway, that's pretty much... oh they, they made a lot of other tactical missiles and all that other sort of thing, nuclear missiles, they even went into nuclear for a while. But, that was a pretty exciting career.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.