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Springtime In El Segundo

Ah, Ive arrived back at the old neighborhood. El Segundo California ( It helps the ambiance if you say it like Jack Webb used to say the words "This is the city" at the beginning of Dragnet)

When I last left the industrial core of EL Segundo California, the brick building on the corner of Sepulveda and 110 said "HUGHES" and now it says "BOEING". Once, long before I showed up to work in some small function in the lowest level of its brick basement, it said "KAISER-FRAZIER", then it said "NORTH AMERICAN AVIATION", then "HUGHES" and now - "BOEING". You can trace the history of the Aviation industry by the sign changes on the properties. You can change the signs, you can even change the companies, but the inside of these buildings no matter who owns them or their jobs within, still give you the stale institutional ambiance of the Deparment of Motor Vehicles. Green walls, laminate floors, the occasional detrius from projects of the past. My building had posters made from long since gone satellites that had been launched in the 1960 and 70's. Most of the people I worked with had no idea what these satellites did, or what Hughes had to do with them, but there they were, just outside of the conference room. I'm sure that the "conference room" was used to store paperwork in the 1960s and that sometime in the 1980s it was upgraded to become a "conference room", but try as they might, it still had that "lost in the sands of time" feel about it.

Some things just never go away now matter how much around it end us changing. I'm sure that my desk at Hughes was used by some midlevel bureaucrat to fill out paperwork for the wartime delivery of North American P-51's. Later on, some poor schlub probably used it to write a report trying to explain (yet again) why the Kaiser-Frazier wasnt selling as well as they hoped.

I think the building I worked in might have even been part of the Kelvinator corporation( the refrigerator folks!), but I never found anything while I was there to indicate that to be the case. I did find things from all the other companies I mentioned. Like archaeologists finding signs of earlier civilizations, at Hughes Space and Communications, every time you opened a closet or storage locker you could be sure you would get atleast one "what the hell is this?" as a model of some once "super secret satellite" fell out onto the floor, now oblivious to its place in history or the man hours that were once expended to create it.

But El Segundo is El Segundo. Post World War II - Cold War industrial architecture, sitting shoulder to shoulder with late 1970's glass and beam in the same block as an oil refinery ( hence the name of the town - it was the second refinery, making it "El Segundo") and right there in the middle is a nice set of middle income homes, looking all the world like they were lost in a time warp, sometime around 1965.

Just when you adjust to that, you find that it all sits right next to one of the best beaches in Southern California. Ah, sanity at last you say, and then you drive a bit further and see the sign that leads you to the biggest sewage treatment plant in Southern California. ( And yes, I know you've always wanted to tour a big giant sewage treatment plant, there is in fact a tour for the public! interested in what they find that gets flushed down the pipes every day? Well heres your chance to see your wish fulfilled!)

It's then you know for sure that you are someplace unlike any place else in the world. "The Second?"; if thats the case, I have no real idea what "The First" must be like.

And right in the middle of all of this, sits the home of Barbie, the Mattel Corporation. Well, at least it was when I was here last...

You go to lunch at any of the fast food places in the area and see badges for people working at Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing, SpaceX, Hughes and always, right there in that line would be some guy from "Mattel". It could be very surreal if you were anywhere else, but this is El Segundo, where nothing is really out of place.

The aviation community here is abuzz in anticipation of tommorows arrival of the A380. The word I have from the folks in the hotel is that the Beach area at the end of the runway is already full of people anticipating the arrival. On the north side of the airport, the highway is blocked off and crowds are encoraged to start forming at 5:00am. All this for an aircraft that doesnt arrive until 9:30am ( which isnt that much different from the time they would need to be at the airport in advance, were they to fly out on it...)

I'm going to pop out and get some dinner, drive around for a bit and see if theres anything worth putting to film.

I'll be back later. I want to blog about the arrival of Dr. Hugo Eckner and the Graf Zeppelin to Los Angeles in 1929 and how much as changed and not changed since then...

Posted @ March 18, 2007 05:53 PM | Aviation

Posted by: leelu at March 21, 2007 01:25 PM

Posted by: frank martin at March 21, 2007 01:33 PM