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RP: And you eventually launched a career as, for Lockheed?

JO: Yeah. Then I come back and I worked some little company for a month and Lockheed was on strike. So, and then I went Lockheed and I worked in their production machine shop for a couple years and decided, oh boy, they can only go so far. Even though I was getting the, upgraded. I went back and took a big cut and pay and went through the apprenticeship program to be an experimental machinist. I don't know whether you know what an experimental machinist is. Experimental or a general machinist, you run all kinds of different machinery, regardless. And there we used to get a, something like a hundred pounds of metal and there's a blueprint and you make it. So whatever it takes, whether you run a lathe, a metal machine, a boring bar, a grinder or whatever, you had to know. And that's kind of training I got. I did that until the training I think until '59 or somewhere in there, '58 or '9, I finished up. I got all the credit for the time I worked in the production shop, too.

So I did that, I worked on the, some of the first, this C-130 airplane that Lockheed made. They're still making it in fact. And P-3 and they'd just converted from the Electra to the P-3 when I worked on that. I worked on the model that they had for the L10-11 when it first started. It was making parts and things. I didn't actually do the work on the plane itself. Even though a couple times I had to go in there because some of the things they had, the guy says engineer wasn't really sure. He said, "You'd better go in there and take a check and see." So I had to go check and see what the size and stuff check and things. The first pylons on the P-3 wings that they have, the fitting up there, I worked on those. And if you people don't know anything about the fittings, they're compound angles. They're not a straight one way angle or two way angle. And to cut that, it's completely something else. I mean you don't set the two angles and cut it. You've got to compensate and everything because as soon as you set the second angle, it changes the first angle. And they, I had to work that out. It took me two days to do all the calculations on that. And the boss come over and he's lookin' saying, "What are you doing?" I says, "I got to calculate this." He just says, "Oh." But he wasn't a machinist so he didn't know. But after that he left me alone. I didn't --

KP: Five minutes left.

RP: Okay.

JO: I didn't get to finish the part because they pulled me to another machine, and another part. This part started at six hundred pounds. It's an aluminum part which was a... you could carry the bombs for the 104 and they ended up forty pounds. So you could imagine how much machine work there was on that.

RP: Oh. So how many years did you put in with Lockheed?

JO: Thirty-seven years. Well, I went from there to finance. I worked in finance for six years, and I was pricing all engineering changes and what they call re-work, government furnish equivalent. The funny part, you know, government furnish equivalent, you think you're getting a new parts. Uh-uh. They used to get a lot of parts that the navy people, something happened to it and they, the white hats would change it but never tell anybody. So when they came in, they had a surplus, they'd send it to us. And we put it in the plane, it don't work. So we had to take it out and, well, all that is not included in the price of the airplane. So I had to, that's what I was doing for a long time, pricing that. I also priced, they had a lot of engineering change. And the last big job I had... then I went to procurement. And procurement I was pricing all subcontractor parts that were furnished to Lockheed. And the last job before I retired I had to go to Portugal before they were... sold planes to Portugal and they were updating and retrofitting them. And that was something else. I really didn't want to go on that trip. I enjoyed it, but then it was something else. And then when I, after I retired they called me back because they were having some trouble with the pricing. And I said, "Did you check this, check that?" No, we didn't check it. And then when I went back then they called the Portugal, and they said, "No, they didn't use this money. They didn't..." It's different how government does their pricing. So you're... quite different. I don't know how they did it with you but... [Laughs]

RP: Oh, yeah, they got a different system for us.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.