11. The Death of Riley

My L. A. suburb sold itself into existence as “The City of Tomorrow Today” at the beginning of a new age in Los Angeles. The end of that age was down the street. The buildings where the future had been fabricated - in the form of Douglas jets - stood not far from where I live. Those buildings are gone now. The industry those buildings stood for is gone, too. No one makes jetliners in southern California anymore.The Douglas plant in Long Beach had employed 50,000 workers during World War II and began the Cold War era as the largest aerospace industry employer in California. But Douglas wasn't alone. Through the 1960s to the end of the Vietnam War, aerospace manufacturing in Los Angeles County employed more than 250,000 workers. As late as 1990, aerospace employed more than 130,000 countywide, more than half the state's entire aerospace workforce. Today in all of Los Angeles County, only about 38,000 workers are employed in aerospace manufacturing; perhaps 17,000 more in the rest of southern California.

It wasn’t just jets. The image of the men who were building the future was fabricated here, too. At the start of the aerospace age, that image was Chester A. Riley. He was the hero of The Life of Riley, a long-running series that began on a wartime radio program hosted by Groucho Marx, that later became a popular motion picture and one of early television’s most successful situation comedies. The original radio segments were called, with the blackest of Groucho Marxist irony, “The Flotsam Family.” A big-hearted lug, Chester Riley was aerospace flotsam, already adrift with his nuclear family in a landscape of small houses that was meant to be Hawthorne or Lawndale or Torrance.

A lot of my neighbors worked at the big Douglas plant. They had only to look to Riley to see what at least some in America thought of them. But Chester lacked one defining characteristic. William Bendix was cast as Riley. Bendix was a wonderful character actor, but when he opened his mouth, it was Brooklyn that came out. Riley, to be true to life, should have spoken with accents of Oklahoma, west Texas, or Missouri. By 1945, an estimated 600,000 Southerners had moved to southern California to find work in defense plants, completing their migration from the Dust Bowl to the suburbs. Wartime columnist Ernie Pyle called them Aviation Okies. They gave Los Angles aerospace a distinctive, southern-inflected culture with its own music, language, and food preferences, as well as its own politics and racial antagonisms.

I grew up among Aviation Okies and their sons and daughters and saw them whipsawed by cycles of boom and bust in aerospace. I listened to their complaints about Douglas - an organization that seemed to be composed of dense layers of managers with a disturbing inability to manage.

Embedded in LA’s aerospace culture are these contradictory images of men’s work. Over at Douglas, 50,000 Rileys riveted together large parts of a tomorrow that has passed away. And other men in white shirts and narrow ties managed only to threaten or cajole them. Who never managed to offer them a better image of the future. And when tomorrow finally came, it had no further need of them - Riley or his bosses.