Seattle - Los Angeles

So I graduated and went to work for The Boeing Company. That meant we moved to Seattle, my wife, my kid, and I. We rented a nice enough place, then a slightly nicer place, then in a fit of overconfidence managed to buy a little house at the end of an easement. If you don't know the term, neither did I. It's a public agreement in which all the neighbors along a stretch agree to cede to the city enough room for a road. In our case, a one-lane road at the front edge of our properties.

It was my only ever good investment in real estate.

But that's just a glimmer of what this page is about. We moved to Seattle and for a few weeks I worked in a former factory down in the railroads and warehouses part of Seattle. Suddenly with no explanation, I was in a new division of The Boeing Company and we moved into a new building closer to where I lived. (The nicer apartment.) I had a new job too, on a new-to-us project, the Lunar Orbiter mission.

We would eventually (five satellites, five flights) map 98% of the surface of the moon, and those maps would help the astronauts decide where to land. But that's another story too.

For this page, what it meant was that for the rest of the two-and-a-half years I lived in Seattle, I spent half my time in Los Angeles. We would work for three months or so in Seattle preparing for the next flight, fly to Los Angeles and practice for the flight at the Jet Propulsion Lab, then actually fly the mission and turn all the data over to NASA. (This is as seen from my point of view. I'm sure the managers had a different view of things.). Then we'd repeat, all the time working so hard and so fast we hadn't time to think about home life and personal relations.

It was damn near a disaster in that part of my life, but oh damn! Was it fun! A challenge I proved up to, we did, the team of us engineers, programmers, and whatnots. We had a forty-year anniversary celebration later and a surprising amount of that team feeling still resonated!

That was Seattle - Los Angeles for me.

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