Blue Sky Dream (36 page)

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.

F
or 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!’ ”

R
isk, 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.