The year 1969 was a year of catastrophic events for the Santa Barbara area. Early in the year there was an enormous brush fire which started at Mountain Drive north of the city and was fanned by an onshore airflow. It spread with incredible speed up the Santa Ynez Mountain range west of Highway 154. Hundreds of family homes were burned because many of them were not accessible to fire engines and were surrounded by manzanita bushes that burn at very high temperatures.....

Man on the Moon

On July 21, 1969 the Apollo 11 mission landed the first man on the moon and we were watching it on television. Many people thought it was a simulated landing but we at DRL, who were involved in the manufacture of the Lunar Rover Vehicle (LRV) that was earmarked for later Apollo missions, knew that the broadcast was the real action.

A Perk with a Nudist Show?

In late 1970 I was sent to a technical symposium on infrared technology in San Francisco and at that point in time I didn't know that was going to be my future field of employment. I suspected that the person who had originally been scheduled for it was no longer with DRL. It was a last perk before I would get my pink slip and so I decided to make the most of it. I read in a local San Francisco paper that "Oh Calcutta" was playing. The concierge at the hotel got me a seat for a matinee. I left the boring afternoon session of the symposium and went to see the show....

I joined the Research Center (RC) across the street from DRL, as a manufacturing engineer. They assured me that my previous objections regarding the clean room space were going to be eliminated....

RC was tooling up for the manufacture of the FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared)detector assembly. It was a new product, and the end product was a subassembly for the B-52 G and H series Electronic Vision System (EVS).The complete system was manufactured by the parent company in El Segundo. The FLIR was a formidable project for all the organizations involved, and for the RC it constituted a major percentage of their business....