Skunk Works

As fearsome as Kelly was supposed to be, I knew he would be a pushover compared to my own stern father, Isidore Rich, a British citizen who had been, until the outbreak of World War II, the superintendent of a hardwood lumber mill in Manila, the Philippines, where I was born and raised. The Riches were among the first Jewish families to settle in Manila, and after one of my paternal grandfather’s business trips to Egypt, he brought back a snapshot of the beautiful young daughter of one of his Jewish customers to show to my bachelor father. My father was enchanted, and a flirtatious correspondence bloomed into a full-fledged romance; marriage followed a few years later. My mother, Annie, was a French citizen, born and raised in Alexandria, a brilliant linguist who spoke thirteen languages fluently, a free spirit who pampered me, as her second youngest among four sons and one daughter. Mother was the opposite of our authoritarian father, who ruled over us like a Biblical prophet and used a strap to enforce his commandments. We lived in a big house with lots of servants on my father’s very modest, middle-class salary, enjoying a way of life that was patently colonial and exploitive of the locals, but wonderfully secure and languid as the tropical air itself. My parents dressed formally to dine at their club and play bridge. We raised twenty-three police dogs in our huge backyard that resembled a tropical rain forest. And in later years, I amused Kelly with the story of how I built my first airplane at the tender age of fourteen. An older cousin bought a Piper Cub from a local flying club and to his dismay discovered that it came in a dozen crates and that he had to assemble it himself. My brothers and I built it for him in our big backyard, and after weeks of hard labor, we discovered that the finished product was too big to fit through our front gate. We had to take off the wings—but still no go. Then the tail, and finally the landing gear. In the end, we recrated the damned thing and my cousin got his money back. A few years later, that same cousin barely survived the infamous Bataan Death March.

By then, my family and I were safe in Los Angeles, having fled the island only a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As tough as it was starting life anew, none of us were complaining: my father’s sister, who had weighed a hefty one hundred and fifty pounds before the war, emerged from a Japanese prison camp as a gaunt, eighty-pound skeleton.

During the war years, my father and I worked in a Los Angeles machine shop to keep the family going. I was able to start college only after the war ended and I was already twenty-one. So I gave up my dream of becoming a doctor, like my father’s brother, who was a world authority on tropical medicine, and decided to become an engineer instead. I graduated from Berkeley in mechanical engineering in 1949, in the top twenty in a class of three thousand, and decided to go on for my master’s at UCLA, specializing in both aerothermodynamics and dating sorority girls. By then I had met my future wife, a beautiful young fashion model named Faye Mayer, who had an incomprehensible weakness for skinny engineers who smoked pipes. We got married just in time for me to start job hunting in the middle of the painful postwar recession and discover that a UCLA hotshot with a master’s degree was just another candidate for unemployment. But one of my professors tipped me off to an engineer job opening at Lockheed’s Burbank plant. I was hired and worked under Bernie Messinger, Lockheed’s heat transfer specialist, when Kelly had phoned Bernie asking him to borrow a competent thermodynamicist for an undisclosed Skunk Works project. Bernie tapped me.

Since its inception back in 1943, when the first German jet fighters appeared in the air war over Europe, the Skunk Works had been entirely Kelly’s domain. The War Department had turned to Lockheed’s then thirty-three-year-old chief engineer to build a jet fighter prototype because he had designed and built the twin-engine P-38 Lightning, the most maneuverable propeller-driven fighter of the war. Kelly was given only 180 days to build that jet prototype, designed to fly at 600 mph, at least 200 mph faster than the P-38, at the very edge of the speed of sound. Kelly set to work by borrowing twenty-three of the best available design engineers and about thirty shop mechanics at the main plant. They operated under strict wartime secrecy, so that when he discovered that all available floor space in the Lockheed complex was taken for round-the-clock fighter and bomber production, that suited Johnson just fine. He rented a big circus tent and set up shop next to a noxious plastics factory, whose stench kept the curious at bay.