Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

5 HOW WE SKUNKS GOT OUR NAME

I first showed up at Kelly Johnson’s front door, in December 1954, as a twenty-nine-year-old thermodynamicist earning eighty-seven bucks a week. I had never before set foot inside the so-called Skunk Works, in Building 82, a barnlike airplane assembly facility next to the Burbank Airport’s main runway, where Kelly and his minions held forth in a warren of cramped offices, oblivious to the outside world. Everything about that operation was secret, even what building they were in. All I knew for sure was that Johnson had called over to the main plant, where I had been working for the past four years, and asked to borrow a thermodynamicist, preferably a smart one, to help him solve some unspecified problems. It was like a band leader calling over to the union hall to hire a xylophone player for a one-nighter.

My expertise was solving heat problems and designing inlet and exhaust ducts on airplane engines. In those years, Lockheed was booming, cranking out a new airplane every two years. I felt I was in on the ground floor of a golden age in aviation — the era of the jet airplane — and couldn’t believe my good luck. As young and green as I was, I had already earned my very own patent for designing a Nichrome wire to wrap around and electrically heat the urine-elimination tube used on Navy patrol planes. Crewmen complained that on freezing winter days their penises were sticking painfully to the metal funnel. My design solved their problem and I’m sure made me their unknown hero. Both my design and patent were classified “Secret.”

My input was far less dramatic working on America’s first supersonic jet fighter, the F-104 Starfighter, nicknamed by the press “the missile with the man in it” in tribute to its blazing Mach 2 speed. I helped design the inlet ducts on that, as well as on our first military jet transport, the C-130, and on the F-90. The latter was a stainless-steel jet fighter, capable of pulling twelve-g loads during incredible dives and turns, but was woefully underpowered since the engine originally designed for it was canceled by the Air Force for budgetary reasons. So the F-90 wound up serving the country by being shipped to Ground Zero at the Nevada atomic test site at a mock military base specially constructed to determine how various structures and military equipment would withstand an A-bomb explosion. The short answer was everything was either vaporized or blown to pieces except for the F-90. Its windshield was vaporized, its paint sand-blasted, but otherwise our steel airplane survived in one piece. That sucker was built.

The projects at Lockheed were all big-ticket items, and workrooms as big as convention halls were crammed with endless rows of white-shirted draftsmen, working elbow to elbow, at drafting tables. We engineers sat elbow to elbow, too, but in smaller rooms and a slightly less regimented atmosphere. We were the analytical experts, the elite of the plant, who decreed sizes and shapes and told the draftsmen what to draw. All of us were well aware that we worked for Chief Engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the living legend who had designed Lockheed’s Electra and Lockheed’s Constellation, the two most famous commercial airliners in the world. All of us had seen him rushing around in his untucked shirt, a paunchy, middle-aged guy with a comical duck’s waddle, slicked-down white hair, and a belligerent jaw. He had a thick, round nose and reminded me a lot of W. C. Fields, but without the humor. Definitely without that. Johnson was all business and had the reputation of an ogre who ate young, tender engineers for between-meal snacks. We peons viewed him with the knee-knocking dread and awe of the almighty best described in the Old Testament. The guy would just as soon fire you as have to chew on you for some goof-up. Right or not, that was the lowdown on Kelly Johnson. One day, in my second year on the job, I looked up from my desk and found myself staring right into the face of the chief engineer. I turned pale, then crimson. Kelly was holding a drawing of an inlet I had designed. He was neither angry nor unkind while handing it back to me. “It will be way too draggy, Rich, the way you designed this. It’s about twenty percent too big. Refigure it.” Then he was gone. I spent the rest of the day refiguring and discovered that the inlet was eighteen percent too big. Kelly had figured it out in his head — by intuition or maybe just experience? Either way, I was damned impressed.

In those days Kelly wore his chief engineer’s hat until around two in the afternoon, then drove off to the Skunk Works, which was about half a mile down the road tucked away inside the Lockheed complex, and spent the final two hours of his workday doing his secret design and development work. There were always plenty of rumors about what Kelly was up to — designing atomic-powered bombers or rocket-driven supersonic fighters. Supposedly, he had a dozen engineers working for him, and we in the main plant pitied those guys who were under that brutal thumb.

Still, the truth was I welcomed the chance to get out of the main plant for a while. Lockheed was very regimented and bureaucratic, and by my fourth year on the payroll I felt stymied and creatively frustrated. I had a wife and a new baby son to support, and my father-in-law, who admired my moxie, was pushing me to take over his bakery-delicatessen, which earned the family a very comfortable living. I had actually given notice to Lockheed, but at the last moment changed my mind: I loved building airplanes a lot more than baking bagels or curing corned beef.

So I was eager to experience Kelly’s Skunk Works, even if I was only on loan to him for a few weeks. It never occurred to me that I had any chance at all to stay there permanently. I was well trained in my engineering specialty and actually had taught thermodynamics at UCLA before joining Lockheed. I was also a naturalized American citizen and intensely patriotic, and welcomed the chance to work on secret projects designed to defeat the Russians. I had plenty of self-assurance and figured that as long as I did a good job, Kelly Johnson would behave himself.

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.

Around the time Kelly’s crew raised their circus tent, cartoonist Al Capp introduced Injun Joe and his backwoods still into his “L’il Abner” comic strip. Ol’ Joe tossed worn shoes and dead skunk into his smoldering vat to make “kickapoo joy juice.” Capp named the outdoor still “the skonk works.” The connection was apparent to those inside Kelly’s circus tent forced to suffer the plastic factory’s stink. One day, one of the engineers showed up for work wearing a civil defense gas mask as a gag, and a designer named Irv Culver picked up a ringing phone and announced, “Skonk Works.” Kelly overheard him and chewed out Irv for ridicule: “Culver, you’re fired,” Kelly roared. “Get your ass out of my tent.” Kelly fired guys all the time without meaning it. Irv Culver showed up for work the next day and Kelly never said a word.

Behind his back, all of Kelly’s workers began referring to the operation as “the skonk works,” and soon everyone at the main plant was calling it that too. When the wind was right, they could smell that “skonk.”[4]

And who knows — maybe it was that smell that spurred Kelly’s guys to build Lulu Belle, their nickname for the cigar-shaped prototype of the P-80 Shooting Star, in only 143 days—37 days ahead of schedule. The war ended in Europe before the P-80 could prove itself there. But Lockheed built nearly nine thousand over the next five years, and during the Korean War the P-80 won the first all-jet dogfight, shooting down a Soviet MiG-15 in the skies above North Korea.

That primitive Skunk Works operation set the standards for what followed. The project was highly secret, very high priority, and time was of the essence. The Air Corps had cooperated to meet all of Kelly’s needs and then got out of his way. Only two officers were authorized to peek inside Kelly’s tent flaps. Lockheed’s management agreed that Kelly could keep his tiny research and development operation running — the first in the aviation industry — as long as it was kept on a shoestring budget and didn’t distract the chief engineer from his principal duties. So Kelly and a handful of bright young designers he selected took over some empty space in Building 82; Kelly dropped by for an hour or two every day before going home. Those guys brainstormed what-if questions about the future needs of commercial and military aircraft, and if one of their ideas resulted in a contract to build an experimental prototype, Kelly would borrow the best people he could find in the main plant to get the job done. That way the overhead was kept low and the financial risks to the company stayed small.

Fortunately for Kelly, the risks stayed small because his first two development projects following the P-80 were absolute clunkers. He designed and built a prototype for a small, low-cost-per-mile transport airplane called the Saturn that was really a sixth toe on commercial aviation’s foot because the airlines were buying the cheap war-surplus C-47 cargo plane to haul their customers and were calling it the DC-3. Then Kelly and his little band of brainstormers designed the damnedest airplane ever seen — the XFV-1, a vertical riser to test the feasibility of vertical takeoff and landing from the deck of a ship. The big trouble, impossible to overcome, was that the pilot was forced to look straight up at the sky at the crucial moment when his airplane was landing on deck. Even Kelly had to concede the unsolvability of that one.

But the open secret in our company was that the chief engineer walked on water in the adoring eyes of CEO Robert Gross. Back in 1932, Gross had purchased Lockheed out of bankruptcy for forty grand and staked the company’s survival on the development of a twin-engine commercial transport. Models of the design were sent to the wind tunnel labs at the University of Michigan, where a young engineering student named Clarence Johnson contradicted the positive findings of his faculty advisers, who praised the design to Lockheed’s engineering team. Johnson, all of twenty-three, warned Lockheed’s chief engineer at the time that the design was inherently directionally unstable, especially with one engine out.

Lockheed was sufficiently impressed to hire the presumptuous young engineer, and learned quickly why this son of Swedish immigrants was nicknamed “Kelly” by his school chums years earlier. He might be stubborn as a Swede, but his temper was definitely Old Sod.

Kelly solved the Electra instability problem with an unconventional twin-tail arrangement that soon became his and Lockheed’s trademark. The Electra revolutionized commercial aviation in the 1930s. Meanwhile Kelly was the shining light in the company’s six-man aviation department — the expert aerodynamicist, stress analyst, weight expert, wind tunnel and flight test engineer — and he did some test flying himself. He once said that unless he had the hell scared out of him once a year in a cockpit he wouldn’t have the proper perspective to design airplanes. Once that guy made up his mind to do something he was as relentless as a bowling ball heading toward a ten-pin strike. With his chili-pepper temperament, he was poison to any bureaucrat, a disaster to ass-coverers, excuse-makers, or fault-finders. Hall Hibbard, who was Kelly’s first boss at Lockheed, watched Kelly work for three days during the war to transform Lockheed’s Electra into a bomber for the British called the Hudson. The transformation was so successful that the RAF ordered three thousand airplanes, and Hibbard was so awestruck by Johnson’s design skills, he claimed “that damned Swede can actually see air.” Kelly later told me that Hibbard’s remark was the greatest compliment he had ever received.

The Skunk Works was always strictly off-limits to any outsider. I had no idea who even worked there when I reported in that first day, just before Christmas, 1954, to Building 82, which was an old bomber production hangar left over from World War II days. The office space allocated to Kelly’s Skunk Works operation was a narrow hallway off the main production floor, crowded with drilling machines and presses, small parts assemblies, and the large assembly area which served as the production line. There were two floors of surprisingly primitive and overcrowded offices where about fifty designers and engineers were jammed together behind as many desks as a moderate-size room could unreasonably hold. Space was at a premium, so much so that Kelly’s ten-person procurement department operated from a small balcony looking down on the production floor. The place was airless and gloomy and had the look of a temporary campaign headquarters where all the chairs and desks were rented and disappeared the day after the vote. But there was no sense of imminent eviction apparent inside Kelly’s Skunk Works. His small group were all young and high-spirited, who thought nothing of working out of a phone booth, if necessary, as long as they were designing and building airplanes. Added to the eccentric flavor of the place was the fact that when the hangar doors were opened, birds would fly up the stairwell and swoop around drawing boards and dive-bomb our heads, after knocking themselves silly against the permanently sealed and blacked-out windows, which Kelly insisted upon for security. Our little feathered friends were a real nuisance, but Kelly couldn’t care less. All that mattered to him was our proximity to the production floor. A stone’s throw was too far away; he wanted us only steps away from the shop workers, to make quick structural or parts changes or answer any of their questions. All the workers had been personally recruited by Kelly from the main plant and were veterans who had worked with him before on other projects.

The engineers dressed very informally — no suits or ties — because being stashed away, no one in authority except Kelly ever saw them anyway. “We don’t dress up for each other,” Kelly’s assistant, Dick Boehme, told me with a laugh. I asked Dick how long I could expect to stay. He shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what Kelly has in mind for you to do, but I’d guess anywhere from six weeks to six months.”

He was slightly off: I stayed for thirty-six years.

Twenty designers were stashed away in choking work rooms up on the second floor. The windows were sealed shut, and in those days nearly everyone smoked. To my delight, I was sharing an office with only six other engineers composing the analytical section, most of whom I discovered I already knew from my previous work on the F-104 Starfighter. Without exception, these were all colleagues whom I had particularly admired at the time, so I gave Kelly a quick “A” for sharp recruiting, myself excepted of course. We were only two doors removed from the boss’s big corner office.

Before I really got to work, Boehme handed me a piece of paper on which was mimeoed Kelly’s “riot act”—ten basic rules we worked by. A few of them: “There shall be only one object: to get a good airplane built on time.” “Engineers shall always work within a stone’s throw of the airplane being built.” “Any cause for delay shall be immediately reported to C. L. Johnson in writing by the person anticipating the delay.” “Special parts or materials shall be avoided whenever possible. Parts from stock shall be used even at the expense of added weight. Otherwise the chances of delay are too great.” “Everything possible will be done to save time.”

“For as long as you work here, this is your gospel,” Dick said. Then he told me we were working with the folks at Pratt & Whitney to modify a regular jet engine to fly higher by at least fifteen thousand feet than any airplane had ever before flown. There were some inlet problems that I would be addressing. I knew the Russians were mediocre engine builders, at least a generation behind us. I figured we were building a radically new high-flying long-range bomber. But then I was shown a drawing of the airplane and I let out a whistle of surprise. The wings were more than eighty feet long. It looked like a glider.

“What is that thing?” I exclaimed.

“The U-2,” Boehme whispered and put a finger to his lips. “You’ve just had a look at the most secret project in the free world.”