ORGANIZATION MAN RETIRES
My father and I are in the sky again. We have not been here together since a day twenty years before when he had placed me with him under the bubble canopy of a sailplane and, to show me what could be done with no power other than a thermal updraft, had sent the two of us somersaulting over the soft green ridges east of Silicon Valley. Shortly after that day, my father stopped flying. He devoted more time to the family, or else, whenever he wanted to be alone, he spent hours in the garage repairing television sets and stereos for friends and neighbors. Those fix-it jobs held a double attraction, he liked to say. They were problems he could solve, and they afforded a chance to make someone happy. But such satisfaction, I sense, could not match his enjoyment now as he pokes the nose of the Cessna through a stratum of cloud above the Santa Cruz range. “As I used to tell the other guys in the squadron,” I hear in my headset, “God must have intended man to fly. Why else would He have made the tops of clouds so much prettier than the bottoms?” I smile in surprise at my father’s uncharacteristic sensualism, his even rarer talk of God. He is smiling, too. “They all laughed at my little attempts at philosophy.”
It was shortly after his early retirement from Lockheed Missiles and Space Company that my father took up flying again. He was only sixty years old, but after thirty-two years with the company his salary and benefits had grown so that the downsizers of Lockheed reckoned it would be cheaper to pay him to quit. They offered him and several thousand others a deal sweet enough that to say no meant you either needed the extra bit of pay that staying on would provide, or else you needed to prove you were still needed by Lockheed and the working world. My father did not place himself in either category. Besides, he guessed (accurately) that the deal would soon evaporate, and people like him would be shoved out the door without the cushy incentives.
So my father was lucky at the end, as he had been lucky (he was saying often, now that he was retired) his entire life. Lately, he would lay it all to “flukes of chance”: He was a teenaged “airhead” handed a Navy scholarship; the Navy “happened” to see in him a jet pilot; “by plain dumb luck” he joined aerospace at the dawn of its Cold War heyday; he had “the great good fortune” to meet my mother; they arrived in an unspoiled California where “the great joys of his life,” we four children, “flourished”; certain investments “worked out”; when his employer no longer wanted him, the news came at the “best possible moment”; and now, upon entering retirement “with health and finances intact,” he has found “the perfect thing” to fill his time, a membership in the Seagulls, a group of men who share ownership of a Beechcraft Bonanza and this Cessna 172 he is piloting today.
“Well, nothing pressing on my calendar,” he says as we drop into more undulating whiteness, emerging to find the Monterey Bay silver-blue and calm before us. “How about we land in Watsonville for a Mexican lunch, do a little whale watching on the way home? Sound like a plan?”
Among the unlucky was Gary Kolegraff. Hired out of college by Lockheed to be a cost analyst on a satellite program, he was laid off ten years later at the end of 1993. He had never married. At thirty-five years of age, he was renting, together with a government geologist and another Lockheed worker facing layoff, a tract home not ten minutes from that of my parents. Sure, fine, he said when I called a few months into his joblessness. Come on over, and I’ll tell you what it’s like for me. His chipperness at the door, his face unlined by worry, made me worry for him. There was a shell-shocked artlessness about Gary Kolegraff, the smile of one who hasn’t quite comprehended an insult thrown his way.
“When they let you go, it’s amazing the cycle you go through. Initial euphoria: ‘I’m free!’ You’re out in the sun playing. But then, I didn’t realize what I’d left until it was gone. The paycheck was gone.”
This house he had lived in for five years, a prototypical rancher of the 1960s, was never meant to be inhabited by single men with futures clouding over. The bright functionality of the original vision was masked by old green shag on the floors, Formula One posters on walls, fried bacon smell in the air. The living room couch faced a pile of stereo gear tangled in cables and extension cords. In the backyard, neglect had made everything brown. In the kitchen, a magnet in the shape of Lockheed’s supersonic SR 71 Blackbird held a Mark McGuire baseball card to the refrigerator door.
“I saw myself as buying a house, settling down, getting married. I guess I saw myself a lot like my dad.”
I had found Gary Kolegraff on a list of the unlucky (exconvicts and aerospace workers, mostly) kept in a three-ring binder at the job search center at Queen of Apostles church. When I saw the Kolegraff name I recognized it. Though I didn’t know Gary, who was a few years behind me in Catholic high school, I knew the Kolegraffs were fellow tribe members in the parish. I was not surprised when Gary told me his father had been at Westinghouse for thirty years, a draftsman on nuclear missile launcher designs and other military projects.
“I’m the kind of person who really likes security, routine. Put in your eight-hour shift and come home and have fun. But now it looks like that’s changed. I’m looking for any job I can find.”
A mere three months’ worth of unemployment checks remained, and still Gary Kolegraff was spending a lot of time on the grounds of Lockheed, still there with unlucky others at the Career Transition Center, a place to print out résumés and make calls and wait for the calls to be returned.
“They try to make it happy. They have coffee and everything, but it’s not a happy place. Looking around at everyone else just reminds you of all the competition for jobs. It’s weird, though. Just showing up at the career center, sitting in a module with a desk and a phone, you feel like you’re still going to work.”
He was hearing that defense workers had the reputation of being out of touch and even lazy, that Lockheed was ridiculed as a training ground in today’s job market. He was imagining the word “Lockheed” read and rejected by those electronic eyes the bigger companies use, the machines that scan résumés before any human being ever sees one. He had lost count of the hundreds of résumés mailed, calls made. All had yielded no more than a couple of dead-end interviews, and chipperness was becoming ever more exhausting to maintain.
“My voice has changed from the stress, a tightening in the voice box. That is showing up in my interviews. It’s almost like a spiral situation. I know it will have to change, something will come up. But it’s something I have to deal with.”
Gary Kolegraff was beginning to think, “I have to almost redefine myself.” He was hoping he could learn to be what the people at the Career Transition Center said he needed to be, a “networker.” He was hoping he would not have to go about redefining himself while living, again, in the house where he spent his childhood.
“If I can’t find a job, I’m considering moving home. That’s a reality I have to consider.”
Gary wanted my phone number. “If I’m feeling blue or something, can I give you a call?” he asked, and I said sure, fine.
What a frightening specter for a blue sky mother and father: the boy at thirty-five hanging up his gray slacks and striped ties in the bedroom where they used to tuck him in at night. Had the mother and father been like Gary’s, had they been gratified to see their child begin a career in his father’s image, what would they now say to the “boomerang” returned to their breakfast table? What could they say, except that a parent’s duty is to prepare the child to make one’s way in the world of work, that they had tried in good faith, but had been mistaken in their teachings?
The lessons, very different, my father taught me about the world of work he conveyed in stories told in the afternoon heat after a lawn mowing, or when we two were alone in the car, or times, after dinner, when he and I lingered at the table. Any of the luck he speaks about today was not to be found in those tales, which I knew were crafted to warn me away from a Lockheed career or anything like one.
If, for example, I were to ask him about his start in aerospace, he would tell me about the J79 jet engine of General Electric, and how one of his first assignments was to write a report every morning about the testing progress of the J79, and how there developed a problem with the fuel control at idle speed, and how a device called the Idle Instability Fix was designed and tested to solve the problem. He would say that the Idle Instability Fix had not worked, and so he had tried to win the smiles of his new peers with a note of comradely humor, adding to his morning J79 report the observation that the failed Idle Instability Fix was “Some fix!” He would say he sent out the stack of morning reports only to find, not long after, the angry face of a superior hovering over his desk, informing him that he would now rewrite the report with his two-word editorial gone from the page, that all the originals would be recalled and destroyed, that he was never, ever again to stray from the facts, only the facts, in his morning reports.
He would place his dismayed self, then, in my mind’s eye. “We all were at plastic topped, gray steel desks, all of them identical, lined up in columns, mine just a desk in a matrix of desks. If you were busy, it was known. If you were not, it was known. Your escape was to go to the john or the candy machine. We all wore white shirt and suit and tie; we wore our suit jackets all day because we were professionals. No self-motivated bright and curious fellow or woman would survive that way today. You had to be,” he would say to me, “sort of conditioned.”
This story contains most of the cautionary elements of his others, the theme of a man’s will bent to the needs of the organization by his superiors’ tactics of punishment and reward, the subtheme of the man lacking the awareness (early on) or the résumé (later on) to opt out. “There were strong messages there for me I probably should have heeded” is how my father ends the story of the J79 morning report.
My father began telling such stories to me when I was in high school and pondering how I might make my way in the world of work. He tells me new ones, now and again, even now. I like to think that I have taken his lessons to heart and patterned my life accordingly. I have never been in any job more than a few years. In the one large organization that briefly employed me, the Hearst Corporation, I behaved with a brittle suspicion of higher management. Otherwise I have joined modest enterprises, several of them nonprofit, which offered low pay and little security in exchange for a slack leash on my time and energy. I am today a freelancer in an economy that is said to have less and less need for anyone who is not a freelancer. My siblings have, as well, all in their own ways, reflected my father’s lessons: my sister who practiced physical therapy in small clinics here and there before taking time out to be at home with her two young sons; my brother, who is married with two daughters, and is a self-employed eye surgeon after buying into a private practice; my younger sister, who, having earned a master’s degree in Spanish, teaches various languages on contract to universities in Spain, France, and Southern California, deciding which international boundary next to cross on the basis of what might prove the most fun and lucrative.
All of us are variations on who you might be if you had “flourished” as a boy or girl in blue sky suburbia but had been given no encouragement to replicate life within the tribe. None of us was ever given cause to imagine a desk for ourself within the windowless walls of Lockheed. None of us today presents the specter of a boomerang child. Gary Kolegraff is the organization son my father and mother never had.
The phone rang and it was Gary, calling my home in Vancouver two months after I’d seen him at his place. He had been feeling a little blue, he said in that eerily chipper voice of his. He wanted to tell me about what had happened at the dinner table of his parents.
“I pretty much broke down. There was like an emotional outpouring of mine. The father of a friend of mine died last Friday and I went to the funeral. I was there and it suddenly hit me. That could be one of my folks. And being laid off, what would I do without them? I’ve been eating there a lot, pretty much every night now, just me and my mom and dad. And I pretty much broke down and told them how it felt.”
Gary had been into the Career Transition Center three times a week since we had talked. The staff continued to offer him coffee and tips on “self-marketing.” He was applying for any job that paid ten dollars an hour. He was considering redefining himself as an airline clerk because they used computers. He had quit a data entry class after three days because he was typing when he should be looking for work. Among the ranks of the unlucky at the Career Transition Center, he was noticing a thinning out, a giving up. He was hearing that Lockheed had just laid off another 2,000 workers in Georgia and that morale among those left at the Sunnyvale complex was very bad.
“A lot of backstabbing is going on. A lot of people are working eighty, ninety hours a week from fear they’re going to be the next one.”
He was spending his time reading books about the stock market in the library of Santa Clara University, though he was not a student there; waiting by the phone at Lockheed, though he was not an employee there; sitting alone in the quiet of his rented tract home with an “incredible feeling of disconnect. You’re floating around in space. You’ve got an oxygen tank, but nothing else.” This is what he had been trying to explain to his parents the night he broke down.
“It was almost like a movie. I realized that I had never told my dad that I loved him. I had never hugged my dad. I asked him if I could give him a hug. And I did. It was real moving.”
After he left, his father broke down, too. His mother told him so later. The next time he was at the dinner table of his parents, they told him not to worry.
“They said, ‘We’re not going to tell anyone.’ I was afraid my brothers would know about it and think I was crazy. But now I think I shouldn’t be ashamed. It’s amazing, but I felt better afterward.”
He told me this as if emotional catharsis was a phenomenon previously unknown to him.
My father’s hugs are such crushings of pleasure that he seems to want to close every seam of light between, to merge two into a single lump of whiskery warmth. When a hug is finished and his face comes back into view, his beaming affection is something his sons and daughters have come to laughingly chide him for, his “dopey grin, big!” He has been a hands-on father from the time we were babies, a father who liked a child on his shoulders or on his lap or carried under his arm like a football on the way to the bathtub. All our lives, he was a father more than generous with hugs, except, of course, when he was lost to those bouts of petulance, when those down-pulled eyebrows and tightened lips formed that map of danger we all recognized.
There was the time during my adolescence when those bad moods threatened to push me beyond reach of my father’s hugs. His tantrums had become too common and heedless of effect upon me, upon my brother and sisters and mother. Plainly we did not deserve the vehemence of his outbursts, so randomly did they come, so puny were the provocations. Too matter-of-factly did he expect our indulgence afterward, as if a father’s authority naturally extended to bullying. Shouting back seemed only to redouble his attack. I was tempted to leave the bully to himself, for I had been told that bullies were best ignored.
What happened instead, however, is that all of us, my brother and sisters and mother and I, entered into a conspiracy of joshing humor against my father, a conspiracy he completed by gradually joining in. We learned to mimic his tics of irritability, the way he poked his glasses up the bridge of his nose, the way he rammed the heel of his hand against his forehead just before exploding. We repeated back to him his own voice muttering, “What now, damnit? I’ve got a blue million things on my mind!” We invented new names for him, “Daddyman” (a lampoon of Waltons-speak on TV) and “Tuttle” (after the super repair man in the movie Brazil). The names, like the jokes, were methods of diminution, a thousand tickles eroding his dour self-seriousness. As we wandered into this strategy, I believe we were encouraged along, at some level, by my father. The best in him always had been able to recognize the absurdity in a situation, even a bad situation, and play it for a laugh. That part of him seemed to welcome our teasing now, as if he were eager to turn his wit on himself in some show of surrender.
Over time the petulance, while never wholly gone from him, faded in frequency and intensity. Over time, as he told me his cautionary stories about life in the organization, he did so less with bitterness and more with self-deprecating humor. In these tales, never had he cast himself as the hero, but more and more I was invited to join my father in having a good laugh at the antihero’s expense. Those stories, as I have said, had the effect of binding us closer with each telling. In the end, it proved no tragedy of alienation that my father would not, could not, share with me the details of his craft, the equations and accomplishments of his secret engineering at Lockheed. It was enough that he shared with me his regret about having chosen the work in the first place.
We are back on earth, my father and I. He has made a perfect landing at the Watsonville airstrip and we are sitting in the Mexican restaurant by the tarmac, tucking into two enormous burrito platters. As we do, my father tells a story, new to me, set in the last few years of his career.
He tells me that one day he received an order to take a polygraph test. This was routine for “people associated with certain kinds of projects,” my father explains in his carefully vague way.
“You’d report to some outlying, nondescript building. The machine would be on a table with a chair beside it, in a little room with blank walls, and you’d be introduced to the operator. He’d strap you in, run a strap around your chest to measure breathing, attach fingertip pads to detect perspiration, put a sensor over your heart. Then he’d ask questions. Not about your lifestyle, but about the caretaking of classified materials. Have you ever taken classified documents home from work? Have you always stored your classified documents appropriately? Have you ever divulged classified information to a nonauthorized person?
“I think that last was the one I triggered the little squiggles on.”
The polygraph test then became very much other than routine.
“I began to think of the conversations you and I had been having. I didn’t really have this glittering recollection of how detailed things had gotten. Even acknowledging a black program existed was at one time not allowed. My mind wandered, and that’s the wrong way to take a polygraph. With a wandering mind.
“There was also the matter of some notes I had been keeping which could be interpreted as classified information. Whenever you transport classified information, you’re to double wrap it and carry it accompanied by another person cleared on your project. But on a few occasions I had carried those notes by myself, in a plain folder. I knew I’d been doing that. I acknowledged this. But this piqued the interest of the polygraph operator. ‘If he’s doing that, what else?’ His questions kept getting more probing.
“I was called back for a second polygraph and I didn’t do acceptably well on that one, apparently. Time goes by and I get a phone call from the local security office. ‘You’re to be in Washington Wednesday.’ Another polygraph. So I got on an airplane and went out to Washington. In the morning of the interview day I was chatted up by a couple of men in the so-called Program Office. They said, ‘The issue is the transportation of classified information, so tell us about it.’ I told them what I had done, that it was a matter of convenience with zero risk. They said, ‘Everything’s fine here. Have a good lunch. Relax. And be at a certain building at one o’clock.’
“But how can you relax? So I walked into this building, an ordinary office building with six people in the waiting room all sitting there, nobody speaking. I was ushered into this little room where I was introduced to the man who was going to be my host for the day. He was weird. He had this Bob Dole quality about him. He was trying to be friendly, but it just wasn’t happening. You could tell that he felt he was in the presence of the enemy.
“He hooked me up and began to ask a lot of questions about the transportation of documents and the divulgence of classified information. It was then that I told of the chats you and I had had over the dining room table, that I might have said to you that I might have been part of a black program. This went on for a while. The needle would go scritch, scritch, scritch. He’d tear a sheet off the machine and say, ‘I’ll be right back.’ There I’d be, strapped to this machine, staring at a blank wall. Except not all the walls were blank. One of them had a glass mirror and you knew someone was watching. It was like being in a monkey cage. I’d close my eyes, drum my fingers. Then he’d come back and ask another ten or fifteen questions.
“It began to get late. I had now spent three hours in this chair. I said, ‘Hey, look, I’ve got an airplane I need to catch.’ He said, ‘You’d better change your reservation.’ I went out to the receptionist, who was packing up for the day. I made a reservation for a late-night flight. The grilling went on. You begin to feel paranoid: ‘They’re going to find out things I didn’t even know when I walked in here.’ You’d spilled your guts to this guy, told him things you’d done, might have done, thought about doing, and he’s still pursuing this. I began to think this was a careerender. My security clearance would be revoked. I know of a man who blew his polygraph. He was frog marched out the door. I was thinking, ‘My future could depend on what I’ve already got on this chart paper.’
“I don’t remember whether or not he told me flat out that I did not look innocent. But finally the guy said, ‘We’re not getting anywhere here.’ And then he asks me, ‘How do you feel about all this?’
“I said, ‘Just on the basis of what you’ve asked and how long it’s gone on, I’m assuming the wiggles on the page don’t exonerate me. But I can assure you, sir, that I’m a good soldier and the information has not fallen into the wrong hands.’
“He said, ‘Ahhh, that’s good stuff.’ He shook my hand. ‘Well, good luck,’ he says, as if we were still good friends—just about as good as we were when I walked in.
“On my way home, driving to the airport, I resolved I was never going to take a polygraph again. It was so unpleasant and I was so poor at it, I knew that if I did nothing to violate security regulations, I’d still probably flunk the next one because I’d be so worried about flunking. I said to myself, ‘I don’t care if this is a condition of employment. I will refuse. I don’t deserve it. I haven’t earned it. They have no reason to suspect me.’ So here was a case where the very mechanism used to identify the loyal employees was driving a dedicated and hidebound organization man like me right out of the organization. I was no longer a willing member of the group because of the way I was treated.
“What finally happened is a letter went into my security dossier, citing carelessness in handling classified material. It said, basically, ‘We admonish you, and don’t ever do it again.’ I did not lose any access I already had.
“And why should I? I was too wimpy and scared to be a real threat. Look at this CIA guy who singlehandedly dismantled the U.S. spy network in the Soviet Union. He passed every polygraph because he had the skills. The people they catch are the honest ones. I’m the guy whose palms sweat!”
“Great numbers of professionals from many walks of life, trained to cooperate unfailingly, must be recruited. Such training will require years before each can fit his special ability into the pattern of the whole.”
When Wernher von Braun projected this vision of how the new middle class would make its way in the world of work, when he spoke of this human system perfectly engineered so that his “flotilla” of spaceships would go to Mars while his ascendent tribe of technocrats cheered with pride on Earth, he did not explain how people could be made to cooperate unfailingly. He did not, for example, speak to the problem of the person who has special abilities to offer, yet because of gender or skin color or late middle age, is made to feel a poor fit. He did not say how such recruits might react to the news that they are no longer wanted within the pattern of the whole.
For much of the span of my father’s career, there has been at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company a group of employees united in the accusation that they have been cheated of Wernher von Braun’s promise. They have not found in Lockheed the meritocracy they sought, one ordered by objective measurements of skill and dedication, this data tallied reliably in each member’s regular performance reviews. Instead, they see in their blue sky workplace a murk of prejudice and favoritism.
Members of the Lockheed Minority and Female Coalition, as they named themselves in 1970, are said to be “vocal” and “radical” in articles about them in the San Jose Mercury News. “I’ve covered a lot of labor disputes,” a veteran reporter told me, “and this is the most militant employee group I have ever met.”
The basis of their anger is to be found in the Mercury’s pages. In 1973 the coalition won a class action discrimination lawsuit, wringing from Lockheed a pledge to provide several thousand jobs to people other than white males. In 1985 a federal investigator’s preliminary report, passed among employees, was “scathing,” according to the Mercury, “full of examples of unchecked discriminatory practices and serious weaknesses in Lockheed’s affirmative action efforts. A final report—after Lockheed had a chance to rebut allegations—was much more moderate but still critical.” In 1991, Lockheed’s own probe of one facility found it a bad place to be a female. “Any woman who is promoted or receives favorable personnel action is perceived to have had a romantic relationship with management,” concluded the internal study. In 1992 an African-American named Norman Drake won nearly a million dollars in a lawsuit against Lockheed. He had been hired as a satellite engineer but demoted to security guard; along the way, he said, coworkers dumped garbage on his head, assaulted him, told racist jokes over the public address system, and hung up a picture of a black man in chains with “Norm, dumb nigger” scrawled on it. A white engineer named Johnny Atnip, claiming he stuck up for Drake and paid for it with the loss of his own job, settled his suit out of court. In 1993 a black satellite engineer named Charles Okoli was awarded $275,000 by a jury who did not agree with his claim that racism had thwarted his promotion at Lockheed. What the jury did find is that when Okoli cried racism, his superiors retaliated with “malice,” branding him a “troublemaker” and inflicting other “emotional distress” upon him. In 1994, a new government assessment of the company’s work culture found its way into the hands of employees, who turned it over to the Mercury. The front-page story began, “Lockheed Missiles & Space Co., which in recent years has faced a barrage of bias lawsuits, has discriminated against 109 minority job applicants and failed to meet a broad range of affirmative action obligations, according to a preliminary federal investigative report.”
To all these episodes and to picketers charging racism and homophobia outside the company’s gates, the response by Lockheed management has been consistent: The mechanism is sound but for an unavoidable glitch of human nature here and there, which is repaired as soon as the faultiness reveals itself. “There has been much more accountability put in the employment process, more training, more sensitivity at the upper levels, much more recruiting,” Lockheed’s lawyer told the Mercury in 1994. “There may be a fight or altercation [among employees],” company president John McMahon told the newspaper in 1993, but it was “dead wrong to say Lockheed is racist.” Putting the blame on self-serving rhetoric by “a spattering of people who … certainly don’t represent the community of employees at Lockheed,” McMahon left the reader to take his implication. At a moment when juries were awarding huge sums in bias suits, a moment also when deep cuts were facing the community of employees of Lockheed, there was plenty of incentive to invent a victim’s tale.
I heard the ring of plausibility, however, in the story offered me by John Farris, an engineer fifty-six years old with a neat mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and black skin. The day we spoke, he had filed no lawsuit, had no air of militancy about him, yet he looked back on his Lockheed career as a promise broken all the same.
John Farris’s voice kept the smokey burr of Oklahoma City, where his father had loaded cotton bales and butchered livestock. Reading a book on telemetry as a young man inspired him to get a degree in electronics and join Lockheed in 1965 as a missile electronics technician. Four years later he was promoted to publications engineer, writing research and documentation for missile tests. He enjoyed the work immensely for the personal initiative it demanded. “There was nothing holding me back.” He moved his wife and three children into a ranch home in a south San Jose tract where all the streets were named for racehorses. Nights, he studied for a second engineering degree.
In the early 1970s a new supervisor’s performance reviews rated him marginal for work John Farris considered well above average. That supervisor “almost dared me to complain,” he said. “Like, ‘What are you gonna do about it?’ ” Never use the word “racism” in such a situation, John Farris knew from the role-playing games in the management psychology class he was taking. To his supervisor, he quietly said, “You might have a preconceived idea about me because of what I look like.” After that, the performance reviews and meetings about them worsened, until John Farris refused to sign off on one evaluation, saying, “If I had a worker like this, I’d fire him.”
He was not fired, but was moved from one group to another and then others, his reputation preceding him each time. “I’m going to send you a problem,” his new coworkers would be told, and so they would treat John Farris as trouble to be avoided. He was without a mentor in a place where mentorship had everything to do with who got the challenging work and its pay raises, said John Farris. Nor could he be a mentor, because when the boss was away, he never was placed in charge. His juniors kept receiving that honor. Then, when technical questions stumped them, they would say, “Go ask John.” Slurs, the few times he heard them, tended to be posed as sly ribbing, like the time a manager said to him, “If it hadn’t been for Lincoln, maybe we wouldn’t be having some of the problems we’re having today.”
After a while, John Farris sought escape from his “problem” reputation by working with subcontractors who knew merely that “I wore nice suits and drove a BMW.” After a while, he stopped trying to tell his wife and children about the good engineering he did, assuming they would doubt him. “If you’re not getting promoted, it doesn’t look like you’re telling the truth.” After a while, he began spending “too much” of his spare time on his fishing boat or communing with fellow Masons at the lodge, hours lost to his family while he was “trying to feel my manhood.” His wife divorced him.
On an autumn day in 1994, he was told to see a manager who said, “Your number’s up.” John Farris could not tell me why he did not abandon Lockheed Missiles and Space Company before the company could abandon him. He wishes he had, because shortly after clearing out his desk he stepped on a plane to Ghana, finding there some interesting consulting opportunities for a black man with two engineering degrees. In that West African country, which he had always wanted to visit, John Farris found, too, a sense of “mutual respect” he had not known all those years in Lockheed’s world of work.
For a brief while in the middle of the 1990s, nearly a quarter of a century after the first meeting of the Lockheed Female and Minority Coalition, new and different faces began showing up at gatherings of that “vocal” and “radical” group. They were white and male and fiftyish. They were victims, they claimed, of meritocracy subverted. They had spent years accumulating performance reviews and polygraph results until their files bulged with precise calibrations of their high worth to the organization. And yet that bulge in their files had become their enemy; Lockheed seemed to be firing costly senior workers in favor of youth, cheap and flexible. These rejected middle-aged white men were now in the process of gathering the data to prove themselves members of a definable, oppressed minority group. Lawyers had been hired, and when the data was in, they were going to file a class action suit for millions, just as other minority groups had their own class action suit in the works against Lockheed.
As it turned out, neither suit was filed. Lockheed management would offer this as proof that no basis ever existed; lawyers for the other side have told me that Lockheed sealed too many pertinent files in the name of national security, covering over injustice with the cloak of the black world. But when it came to proving age bias against white males, there were other problems, one of the lawyers explained to me. Many of his clients, some of the most angry ones, thought they could win the day simply by identifying the less worthy, those peers who still had their jobs just because they had played it more shrewdly, had made friends up the ladder. These clients were wrong in thinking that this, the way of all organizations, would move the court. Or, in the end, one of their own lawyers. “It’s unpleasant to have to acknowledge that your own privilege as a white man helped you get as far as you did get,” the lawyer mused to me. “And that is something I never heard from any of my clients.”
He had never heard the stories of my father, of course, who freely acknowledges, “Many a time, when Lockheed was looking for people to toss out, I was rescued from the trash heap just because the right person liked me, a mentor stepped in and said, ‘I’ll take him in my program.’ If I had been black or female or the wrong age, that wouldn’t have happened.” When my father retired, the people of his program held a lunch hour party with a cake and coffee and speeches. He was by then high enough in the hierarchy to have negotiated and guided projects worth $100 million a year. He was valued, clearly, by the forty well-wishers at his going-away party, who gave him a statuette of a winged dragon grasping a jewel in its talons, with the inscription, “To HAL BEERS In Recognition of 32 Years at Lockheed Providing Leadership and Dedication To Programs of National Importance.” The dragon with jewel was symbolic, apparently, of whatever mysterious system my father had helped engineer in his last years at Lockheed.
My father brought home the statuette, placing it on the desk where he pays bills and changes the diapers of his grandchildren when they visit. On and around the desk, he arranged other items. A plaque: “EAGLE AWARD Presented to Hal Beers on this 24th day of September, 1992. For Vigilant Guidance Provided to the Subcontractor from the Matrix Subcontractor Team.” A pen and pencil set: “In recognition of the significant contribution to a national program essential for the security of the United States of America.” A plaque: “Hal Beers” on a brass plate below a picture of a ghost emerging from an opened safe.
These mementos, I thought when I saw them, were hints of those stories my father never could tell me, stories that might explain why he does declare himself, today, to have lived the life of a lucky man. Forever bound by his oath of secrecy, my father would offer only this explanation: “I’ve been fortunate enough that on more than one occasion, our accomplishments have been very gratifying and technically extraordinary.” Whatever miseries the organization had inflicted, whatever sacrifice the blue sky tribe had exacted, he was lucky to have what the unlucky ones did not. At the end he was given cake and speeches, a dragon statuette and modest affluence for his remaining days, all of it proof of receipt of one life tendered. He was given reason to know he had fit well within the pattern of the whole.
I phoned Gary Kolegraff one August evening, six months after our last conversation, to see how he was faring under the rules of the new economy. Quite well, he assured me, the chipper voice turned exultant. He’d been hired by a small, aggressive company that used satellites to map routes for police and other drivers in a hurry. He was paid better than at Lockheed, and this where the average employee was twenty-five and the chief executive officer wore Bermuda shorts. He had landed this accounting job not through the Career Transition Center of Lockheed, nor through the intercessions of Queen of Apostles, but by walking through the front door of Navigation Technologies and asking for an opportunity to prove himself. And then, having avoided the dreaded move home to Mother and Father, he had boarded an ocean liner to the Virgin Islands. These days, he was back in the market for a girlfriend, perhaps marriage and a family of his own.
“I’ve got this lady I met on the cruise coming out to visit. She’s from Greenwood, Indiana. I think she’s a secretary; I’m not positive. We’ll do the Monterey thing, drive around. If that works out, we’ll have to see how it goes. I don’t want to spoil her too bad!”
What remained of his Lockheed severance package he had invested in the stock market, buying into Microsoft and betting on a firm that made ozone-safe refrigerants. He was developing a taste for risk, finding it invigorating.
“I probably have more shares than I should. But I love it. I like taking a chance. My roommate, the one who still works for Lockheed, he can tell by my mood that I’m happy. I would never, ever go back there! Deep down he knows he should leave. But he’s in that phase I was in. I feel like shaking him and telling him, ‘Hey! There’s a whole world out there!’ ”
Risk, very small but real, is what compelled my father to stop flying those many years ago. Should he die in one of the small plane crashes we occasionally would read about in the newspaper, we would be left without a father and his income. It would not be fair to expose us to such risk, he believed, nor the risk of his trying to reinvent himself merely because he was bored and dissatisfied with his work at Lockheed. He would live with his choices of work and not risk the loss of security, the loss of stability, that changing career in midstream entailed. Plan the flight and fly the plan, the Navy had taught my father, and that is how he would proceed with his life.
My father is explaining this to me as he maneuvers the Cessna 172 out of a slow banking turn, the silver blue of the Monterey Bay slipping behind the mountains at our backs, Silicon Valley’s labyrinth of lanes and cul-de-sacs presenting itself before us. My father tells me that when he was just out of the Navy, he had expectations of joining the exciting and select society of engineering test pilots. But certain events overtook him: marriage, me, the job offer from Lockheed, California, three more children. There was one instance, he confides, when he did leave his desk at Lockheed and make inquiries about how a man like him might change his career and become a working aviator again. But neither the world of test flying nor airline piloting had any use for my father because somehow, without his marking the time closely enough, he had become thirty-seven years old.
This story of a foiled, last-ditch escape attempt is new and surprising to me and it prompts me later, as we drive along the World’s Most Beautiful Freeway in my father’s brand-new, silver and streamlined Camry, to ask him for one more revelation. I have never, in the twenty years after my father beat my face black and blue on a summer evening, summoned that memory from him. I have long since forgiven him for it, have long since returned the crush of his hugs with love to match, but I am wanting to know the answer to this remaining mystery in my father. So cataclysmic an episode must hold a key, certainly, to the puzzle my father was then. The car is quiet and warm, and my father and I have had a good day in the sky, and so I ask him, “Do you remember it?”
“Yes,” he says, “I hit you, didn’t I?” He wears the expression of one asked to recall the plot of an obscure movie. By the look on his face, I presume he would prefer to forget. I feel bad for bringing it up and I do not expect any more revelations today. Then my father says, “I have been abusive to every one of you in the family. There are so many bad times I’ve lived to regret.
“Back then, I found myself in a very disturbed state of mind for days on end. And then I’d snap out of it. I was in my late thirties and my life was crystallizing. I could clearly see that things weren’t going to turn out the way I had hoped, the way I had expected when I felt I had plenty of options. I began to feel hemmed in, penned in.
“None of the benefits, none of the very powerful pluses that were coming my way on a daily basis for having married Terry and for having you and your brother and sisters in the house, none of that seemed to make a bit of difference. When that was all, really, that I should have ever cared about. I was pissed off all the time and life looked to me a very dreary landscape. And what that leads to is, if you’re disappointed in yourself you find yourself doing bizarre things that hurt the people you love. You pick on the people you love and the reason you do it is you know they’ll forgive you. And that’s what I would do. Even today I fly into little rages with the people I love. I hope they are fewer and less severe and not as long lasting. It’s just a phenomenon I learned about myself, and I see it for what it is.”
My father tells me then about how he came to see this phenomenon for what it is. He would rage at his wife or child and the next morning he would arrive at Lockheed sick with remorse that ached like an alcoholic’s hangover. He would sit, then, at his desk writing what coworkers assumed was documentation related to a secret project of technology. In truth, my father spent hour upon hour writing long essays to himself, recording feelings observed within, working his way painstakingly toward some diagnosis of the irrational at his core. Whatever came to mind he wrote down, blame heaped not only on himself for becoming a “paper pusher,” but also on his wife and children for blocking his way out. What he wrote was often raw and ugly and he never meant it for other eyes, my father tells me. But he kept every page in a folder by his desk, a folder that grew thick over the course of fifteen years, and at times when the hangover of contrition had lifted, he would pull old essays from his file to see where he had been and whether he might now know enough to troubleshoot the problem.
What my father concluded is this. “Puzzling over why I was such a bizarre personality, I resolved it was the difference between myself as reality displayed itself to me, and the inflated self-image I carried around.” My father’s task, the task that Lockheed Missiles and Space Company had in a sense assigned him, was to sit at his desk and write memos to himself until the expectations of a hot young fighter pilot had been reduced to fit the space that had in fact been reserved for him. When my father wrote his last letter to himself, sometime in the early 1980s, he passed the entire file through the shredding machine Lockheed provides for classified documents of no further use.
I love my father all the more for telling me this story, for adding to his familiar theme of regret the honest admission that we, his wife and children, had not only given him much, but had exacted a cost as well. I thank him for the doubt and pain he has revealed to me, layer by layer, not just through his stories but even when I knew it as inchoate anger. I am grateful because all of it showed me why the culture of the corporate bureaucracy was a way of work not only to be avoided, but unlikely to thrive forever. Those organization men and women who shared his misgivings but repressed and ignored them, choosing instead to force a happy face at the dinner table every night, did their children a disservice. If my father had not exposed for me the flaws in its foundation, would I have managed to be so far clear of the blue sky monolith when the toppling began?
On the freeway crowded with commuters finishing their day of work, my father finds a slot in the formation between a rusted Dodge pickup carrying Mexicans and gardening equipment, and a Mercedes sedan with a license plate boasting ABUV PAR. I turn the conversation away from disappointments, toward the sky. I ask my father why the former jet pilot had learned to fly powerless sailplanes years ago, just before he quit flying altogether.
“Soaring is a battle of wits,” he says. “You are an intellect dealing with the airmass. It’s invisible but you are trying to exploit its properties in a way that favors you. And if you don’t do it well, the negative aspects of that airmass are going to force you to land sooner than you wanted to.
“So there’s a case where, sure, you’re encased in a machine, but really what’s going on is intellectual.”
Gary Kolegraff cheerfully tells me that his Navigation Technologies job did not last past three months, that he has landed and lost many other jobs after that, and that he is, for the moment, without employment.
“These companies are generations ahead of Lockheed and I find it a really hard fit. They actually make you work! Believe it or not, I may go back to Lockheed for a temp job.”
But not if his latest dream were to come true. He has taken the savings in his Lockheed 401K and rolled it into high-risk, high-growth investments, some of which, like a software maker for the Net, are yielding extremely well. His goal is to clear a $100,000 gain in one day and, if all goes well, to be a millionaire in a few years. Then he will never need a job at all.
“The other thing I’ve been doing is hanging out in coffee bars. That’s what I enjoy most. Just having a cup of coffee and taking a hike all day.”
The cruise ship girlfriend from Greenwood, Indiana, had not been his type, which is fine because he has decided he lacks interest in marriage, anyway. He is living, still, in the rented tract home with the same two single men. Near as I can see, Gary Kolegraff has reinvented himself into a component very attractive to the new economy: the white male unburdened by family, accustomed to the notion of no job (much less a lifetime career), the coffee shop dweller ready to bet his retirement fund on the rises and falls of virtual corporations making their runs at the global market.
“I got my father interested in investing, too. He’s making a fortune in tobacco.”
I hang up the phone and move toward the sound of my baby daughter crying. We are alone in the condominium, Nora and I, for this is one of those days her mother spends at the university where she is a professor of education. I meet Nora’s reaching arms with my own, lifting her from her crib and pulling her tightly to me as we go to the diaper-changing table. At the advanced age of thirty-eight, I am enclosing a child of my own, finally, in a father’s hug.
My wife and I are every bit the cliché of our time as my parents are of theirs. Like any truly modern couple, we do not cede separate realms to each other as did my engineer father and mystic mother. We have been soulmates since our meeting in college, Deirdre and I, drawn together by all we have in common. We are Irish Catholic children of sunny suburbs who share ironic agnosticism, leftward politics, a taste for impolitic humor. We make our livings with words on computer screens and are always interested to read whatever latest product the other has manufactured from those words.
The conceit of the son of the suburbs who moves to the city is that his choice is bolder than the example of the parents. But I don’t think that about myself anymore. Mine has been the more timidly conservative life, in many ways. I did not gamble my happiness on four children before I was thirty-five, nor was I audacious enough to believe I could invent meaning in the vacuum of a freshly sterile subdivision. Deirdre and I have chosen to live in a city of beauty and every amenity, a very easy place to be with no child or even with one. So flush with Asian investment is Vancouver, so perfectly manicured are its parkways and neighborhoods and tourist-friendly attractions, that this city has become the highly desirable suburb to the Pacific Rim. When Diefenback Elkins, a U.S. design firm, advised Air Canada to market all of Canada as “a kind of innocent America, as yet untainted by ethnic tensions and urban blight,” the target customer was me. A blue sky child is raised to recognize the fragrance of optimism in the air, and, for now, Vancouver is heady with it.
From Vancouver we ship to Nora’s grandparents packages stuffed with pictures and videotapes of baby firsts. In return we receive clothes, toys, safety-approved car seats, and Jolly Jumpers, all the equipment necessary for raising a modern child. Clearly my mother and father, like Deirdre’s parents, can hardly contain their relief that Nora exists, that we have made this demonstration of faith in the future. It does not seem to matter to them that Nora will not have what they gave me. She will be raised in the vertical, lawnless downtown, without a cul-de-sac full of playmates or a walnut tree to climb. She will not have a restless, fix-anything force of nature for a father, nor will she be shown the workings of my mother’s heaven. Her father will not be one who planned his flight and now flies his plan, for I have no plan. I have, merely, a nervous sense of the shifting movements of air that we, and now Nora, too, float upon.