Man of the Year

by Susan Cameron

Let's drink to the hard working people
Let's drink to the lowly of birth
Raise your glass to the good and the evil
Let's drink to the salt of the earth
.....M. Jagger/K. Richards

As a young man, my father watched many of his east side buddies go to prison or die in the streets. That’s the way it was, and still is, in White Trash America. But my dad decided to sign up for a stint in the Marine Corps, an act that he swears saved his life. The Corps broke him down, tore him apart, and reassembled him, minus the cocky wise-ass attitude problem he’d walked in with. William Cameron went in as an overweight buck private high school dropout and emerged a few years later leaner, stronger, smarter and better, a field-promoted sergeant with a G.E.D., a wife, and G.I. Bill benefits.

After I was born, Dad and his father-in-law built a solid little house for us in a raw new post-war suburb in former farmland just outside of Detroit. Dad went to an electronics technical school at night, sold Fuller Brush door-to-door and drove a massive fuel oil delivery truck six days a week to support his wife and, by then, two little daughters. When he graduated number one in his class, he applied for a job with a company called Hughes Aircraft in California. They hired him, and off the four of us went, singing “California Here We Come” in our baby blue Rambler.

My parents were somewhat deflated when they discovered that Dad’s starting salary, a healthy paycheck in Michigan, was barely enough to cover food and rent on a grim little apartment down the street from an El Segundo oil refinery. My sister and I rechristened the city El Stinkgundo and learned to play nice with the hard-eyed eight-year-old future convicts who lived next door.

The space race was on – the U.S.A. versus the Russkies – and my ex-Marine dad took to Hughes like the proverbial duck to water. Despite emerging turmoil at home, he applied himself to the company and The Mission.

There’s a lot I don’t know about his twenty-six years of work at Hughes. As a supervisor, he had top security clearance and won’t talk about certain things to this day. But here are the bare bones of a story I found out about recently:

About five years into his career at Hughes, my father designed, fabricated and implemented automated test fixturing for electromagnetic components. Because of this, Hughes saved $100,000 in the first year alone. That was a lot of money back then, which is why the company named my father, William Cameron, Manufacturing Man of the Year, 1967.

Dad’s manager received a large monetary bonus for my father’s work.

Dad’s supervisor received a larger monetary bonus for my father’s work.

My father – inventor, designer, fabricator – received…(drum roll, please!)…

A pen set.

He laughs now. “Yep, still got it in the box. Two Parker pens attached to a black onyx base, or a base that looks like black onyx, and a gold-colored plaque attached: “William Cameron, Manufacturing Man of the Year 1967,” says my dad. “What are you going to do? It would make a good paperweight.”

Them that’s got, shall get
Them that’s not, shall lose
So the Bible says
And it still is news
.....B. Holiday

My father, trained by the Marine Corps, sucked it up. He feels lucky to have worked with brilliant PhD’s like Dr. John Bernham, and Dr. Harold Rosen, father of geosynchronous orbit, the technology that enables satellites to hover over a particular point on earth while hurtling through space at exactly earth’s speed (great for controlling weapons and cell phone transmissions). General Motors eventually bought Hughes and laid off or fired all the brilliant people who had made the company a success in the first place, but my father was fortunate enough to have known them in the glory days.

He is especially proud of his work on the Surveyor program moon probes. He was in charge of procuring parts, and if they didn’t exist?

He made them.

“Holy shit, Dad, your DNA is on the moon!”

“No, no, no,” and he chuckles a little. “Everything we sent up was absolutely sterile so we wouldn’t contaminate the experiments or the moon itself. Nice thought, though.”

1967 was a long time ago. I’m sure my dad’s manager and supervisor bought Cadillacs with the money that should have been my dad’s, and I’d bet the men and their cars have fallen to rust and dust. But tonight I don’t want you to think of any of that.

Tonight, I want you to go outside and look at the moon. Imagine being part of the team that built the Surveyor moon probes. Imagine them soft-landing and –- hooray! -– working, sending back the information we wanted and needed to know before we did the boldest, most audacious thing human beings ever do –- leave Here to go Way Out There.

You and your colleagues did good work, William Cameron, Manufacturing Man of the Year 1967. Semper Fi.

copyright 2010, Susan Cameron