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December 14, 2002 7:42 PM
Part IV - Off to Avila Beach - Donny Laing 1952-1984
Port San Luis
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI
Naomi was up, dressed and out the door before five am and fortunately shouted a good-bye before leaving. She left half-a-pot of hot coffee and a note to call her. I grabbed a cup, retrieved my LA Times and carefully positioned myself back in bed with paper and coffee in hand. I felt one-hundred percent better over Sunday. Needless to say, I had plenty of rest.
Even though, I was not particularly looking forward to work. My buddy Tom and I drove together as we both worked at HITCO Fabricated Composites. We were both doing R&D in a technology called carbon/carbon. He worked in aircraft brakes (boring) and I worked in rocket exit cones (exciting ).
Tom was a great friend, we jogged together regularly and hung out on weekends. I could see he was unhappy in California since a recent visit from a past girlfriend. He was contemplating a move back to his home town near Boston. I'm happy to report, that move was successful as he's still married and has a daughter.
Anyway, no normal person knows what carbon/carbon is but we have all seen it -- at least on TV. It's the black stuff on the belly, nose and leading edge of the space shuttle -- designed to take the brunt of the heat upon reentry.
That carbon/carbon was some special stuff as it has an oxidation inhibitor impregnated into it. It was developed by our competitor. The stuff that we had was an ablative - designed to disintegrate upon reentry. It worked great for rocket nozzles and heat shields that were subject to one time use -- but not so great for stuff that was designed to be reused.
Dr. Peter Chen and I were task to do one better than merely impregnating the C/C -- we were to find a suitable coating for the carbon/carbon so that it would out-perform the competition. The best coating available was silicon carbide but there was one major problem -- the coefficient of thermal expansion between the C/C and SiC was different and that caused the very brittle SiC to crack at the temperatures it was supposed to protect the carbon/carbon from oxidizing. ( you still following me? )
Well Peter's job was to develop an interlayer that would reduce or absorb that mismatch to prevent cracking. My job was to design the lab and process equipment to apply the interlayer and coating. I had the easy part!
Peter was smart but could not formulate a proper sentence in English -- I often wondered how he wrote his thesis at UCLA. We got along just fine as I would always help him write reports -- as coauthor of course!
I was becoming a little concerned the last few weeks as I had submitted my design and budget and they were approved by the R&D Director, but not yet by management. We were even given a large empty building for our laboratory and had worked out all the details with facilities engineering.
What I was to find out that Monday was that there were secret negotiations going on with our competitor. Our management thought it would be more profitable to license the existing technology rather than "reinvent the wheel." Facilities Engineering was secretly designing a new lab based on the technology our management was about to buy -- no wonder they agreed to my initial design without a fight -- it was all going to be scrapped anyway!
Peter and I felt a bit betrayed but he was assigned to scale up the new technology. I was being pushed out the door, although no one actually said so.
I had friends in the Marketing Department, so I was able to delay me demise by helping them with the trade show season. SAMPE was coming up and I used my design skills to put together booth with about a zero budget. They appreciated my work but after the Symposium I was promptly unemployed for the second time in my brief aerospace career.
Naomi and I never made it up to SLO for Memorial Day. In fact it would be months before I would see her again. The summer was bitter/sweet -- I started working out, hung out at the Lighthouse (a jazz bar in Hermosa Beach ) and tackled the job hunt with a vigor.
It seemed odd -- no other employer knew what this carbon/carbon stuff was and my highly specialized skill set seemed about worthless. Money was getting tight and the view of the city from my special rock seemed to dim.
Donny would call from time to time on the weekends, often using a fake English accent in an attempt to cheer me up. Each time he would coax me to come up an help him with his work. Severe coastal storms from last winter had damaged hundreds of boats in the unprotected Port San Luis. The insurance money was finally flowing in and he insisted that he needed my help.
I was a semi-skilled woodworker, but had never worked on a boat in my life. I was reluctant until he told me most of his clients paid in cash. The nearby controversial Diablo Nuclear Power Plant was at peak construction. Hundreds of workers, often putting in 80-hour work weeks, had damaged boats and were flush with cash.
The infamous Diablo Canyon Power Plant - My New Revenue Stream!
Well, I was desperate. I packed a few bags and headed north taking Pacific Coast Highway all the way. As I drove, the stress seemed to leave me and the Santa Barbara coastline was simply awesome.
I managed to find Don's little bungalow in San Luis just before dark. I wasn't keen on being a house guest, but Jules was attending summer school at UCSB, so I wasn't intruding.
Of course Don insisted on celebrating my arrival. We immediately went to his favorite downtown pub. I was starving by that time and delighted to find one of the best "happy hour" spreads I had ever seen. We ate the freebees and drank just "a bit," back at his house by ten. After all, tomorrow was a "work" day.
In the morning, we were up at seven. I was about to get my first taste of working as a shipwright but had no apprehensions. Don said there was no rush because there was only one road into Port San Luis and it was packed with thousands of 1st shift workers on their way to the plant construction site at this hour. They staggered start times between five and eight. We left shortly after eight.
After passing the Madonna Inn, we turned off Highway 101 onto San Luis Bay Road and entered a canyon that wound through the coastal mountains. It was filled with giant live oaks -- hundreds of them all hundreds of years old. The canyon opened up to a stunning overhead view of San Luis Bay. We headed south to Avila Beach and stopped at a small diner for breakfast.
Avila Beach -- before the entire city was rebuilt due to leakage of the oil tanks above it!
Inside, I was surprised to see Ralph sitting at the counter. Don also introduced me to Danny Mulligan who immediately grabbed my hand, squeezed the hell out of it and whacked me on the back, stating unequivocally that I would be a "perfect fit" here. I wasn't so sure.
Aside from eggs, bacon and hash browns, there was a tradition to finish off breakfast with a concoction of tomato juice, Coors Beer and a raw egg. Well, I guess I wasn't in LA anymore.
Actual work began about nine and my first task to fair out a new set of ribs that Donny had fastened into a small sloop whose hull was crushed in the storm. He gave me a gouge and some sand paper and very few instructions and left me to work in that cramped hull for the balance of the morning.
At noon Don came back and inspected my work. "Fantastic" he blurted in his fake accent and immediately showed me were the "googe" was (short for the Gougeon Bothers specially formulated epoxy wood laminating resins ). I put a thin coat of the catalyzed googe on the ribs. While I was waiting for it to "kick," I took my first walk around the boatyard.
There where literally dozens of damaged boats in dry dock and not too much activity regarding their repair. I wandered out to the pier and found a restaurant at the end that proved to have great fish sandwiches -- a daily fresh catch right from the very fishermen moored off the pier. I couldn't resist picking up an LA Times to read during my unscheduled lunch.
Back on the job, my last task was the day was to lightly sand and varnish the entire reworked interior of the hull. The prep took about two hours making the first coat of varnish go on seemingly fast. It looked good, in fact, it looked damn good. I felt like I had accomplished something for the first time in months.
About 3:30, Crazy Dan came back with two cold six packs of Coors and began the ritual of distributing beers to Don, Ralph and me. Surprisingly, work had ceased for the day!
That's when I met Davey, a fifteen-year-old fisherman's apprentice who had run away from his father in LA. His father, he bluntly stated was a junky and he was legally "emancipated," meaning, I guess, he wasn't a run-away after all. It seemed there were many semi-lost souls surviving in the underground coastal economy. Later, I would be instrumental in steering Davey back to school -- he had wanted to captain is own vessel some day.
For the moment, however, the only thing that mattered was the end-of-day workingman's ritual. We all climbed up on the deck of a massive wooden cruiser and sat back, drank our beer and watched the thousands of plant workers begin their daily single file trek home.
A bit later the owner of the sloop came over and began his inspection. Apparently he had not been around for a while. He was beaming over, not only his newly repair hull, but a wonderfully finished interior. He and Don talked for a time, while Dan, Davey and I got to know each other a bit better.
Donny signaled me down from the deck and introduced me to the owner. "Good work" he said. "Six hours today?" "About that," I said. He pulled out a wad of bills and gave me a C-note and a twenty. Then he paid Don for the hull repair - it seemed like a couple of thousand dollars.
By 4:30 we were headed back to SLO. I was tired and sore from working in that cramped hull, but life didn't seem nearly as dismal as it did last Friday. "Tonight" Don said, "I'm going to introduce you to my neighbors." "You know, Ansel Adams' granddaughter lives next to us," he winked.
To be continued . . .
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