The Unwanted Blog

This sort of tale is one I’ve heard many times, from many sources, describing many companies:

http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,9708.msg89638.html#msg89638

Doing this digging reminded me of how I even was able to even have the drawings I have today. Back in 1994, when Rockwell moved from El Segundo (sold all the buildings and land to either developers or Northrop) to Seal Beach, we were asked to just take what we needed to get started (immediate drawings, papers, etc), and pack or throw out the rest. I packed all my old drawings and notebooks in boxes and labeled them. The company threw out any drawings that weren’t claimed into a big dumpster. I remember Marty Crehan going though the dumpster and getting the original B-70, X-15, F-100, P-51, etc drawings!!!! Marty was the biggest collector of old aircraft drawings and books that I had ever met! I don’t know what became of those drawings!When we arrived in Seal Beach, all of our “historical boxes” of material had mysteriously disappeared! All my drawings for the last 20+ years were gone! I think Rockwell had just wanted everything to “go away”. Two years later, when Rockwell was bought by Boeing, Marty Crehan made another great discovery. In an empty factory building, the new Boeing team had found hundreds of boxes of drawings and notebooks that Rockwell had “misplaced” in 1994. Boeing had dumped the contents of these boxes (this pile had to be 50 ft in diameter and 10 ft high!) onto the factory floor, and gave the Rockwell employees one week to claim anything they wanted, and then it was all going into the dumpster! Marty came running into my office and told me to get my butt over to the factory, as all my old notebooks were in that pile! Sure enough, there were all my notebooks and drawings! The scene of Rockwell employees going through this big pile was like people finding their belongings after an earthquake or flood! Boeing never made an official announcement about the pile, so you had to find out about the pile by word of mouth. If Marty had not stumbled on the pile and came and got me, I wouldn’t have ANY of my old drawings!

The last days of United Technologies, Chemical Systems Division, saw somethign somewhat similar. Went into the cafeteria one day, and there was a huge pile of promo glossies dumped on one of the tables; someone had emptied out part of the PR department for the employees to pick through. But most of the historical stuff was simply *gone.* The *vast* bulk of the paperwork, drawings, notebooks and whatnot that had been generated over the years was regularly boxed up and shipped off to an Iron Mountain storage facility; what happened to it after CSD folded, I’ve no idea. The very nice tech library was, IIRC, shipped off to the CPIA… except for the books that managers came in and took off the shelf for themselves (annoying the hell out of the librarian).

It was the tale of the sad fate of the Bell archive (essentially the same as the Rockwell story above, at least as related to me) that spurred me to start scibbling Aerospace Projects Review in the late 1990’s.