[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
a trade deal amounted to signing away the future of commercial
airplane construction in the US? If successful, the
Sabre would eat into traditional US markets, just as the
Airbus had. What was needed was the funding to develop an
engine like the Rolls-Royce Sabre. But the blinkered old men
who advised the president didn't think the time right for
commercial suborbital space travel - they didn't think the
technology was ready. Once, at a top-level White House
meeting, he had even pounded the table and declared that if
prehistoric man had refused to have anything to do with fire
after burning his fingers once, we'd still be living in caves.
There were grounds for Joe's fury. Twenty years ago there
had been 40,000 members in his union. Now there were less
than 20,000,and the plant was shedding a steady hundred
jobs a week. Twenty thousand hard-working, skilled
Americans tossed on the scrap-heap. Joe had been one of
them four years ago when he'd hit seventy. It wasn't the
company that turned him out but his own union. Joe, who
had spent all his life bending rules, came up against the one
rule that they weren't going to let him as much as flex a
little.
'Sorry, Joe,' said the union president, 'but there's no way
we can work something around that Seven-O. Give you
more time in that workshop, eh?'
At the 'Farewell, Joe' dinner in his honour he overheard
one grey-suited munchkin say to another: 'Thank Christ
we've got the little shit off our backs at last.'
That decided Joe. He knew exactly what he had to do. He
rented a cheap office near the complex, hired a secretary,
hooked into the Internet and set up a relocation bureau for
the plant's castoffs.
34
With his boundless capacity for hard work, his knowledge
of the industry and his huge circle of contacts, AeroSpace
Talent was a success right from the start. Joe employed his
union negotiating skills to fix up good deals for his clients,
while the union's relocation bureau was still pratting about
Page 28
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
with the paperwork. He would think nothing of phoning the
president of a corporation if he reckoned he had the right
employee for them. As always, his judgement was as sound
as the huge database he had built up. After two years he
moved to larger premises and took on more staff. Eventually
executives started coming to him - munchkins who didn't
know the nose of an airplane from the tail. They got looked
after by Joe's growing army of assistants. But those off the
shop floor, men and women who shaped metal and plastics
to make airplanes, got Joe's personal treatment.
Joe had a deep-rooted love of engineering - not merely for
the joy of making things useful to one's fellow man, that was
reason enough, but because he believed that making things
was the only real way of creating wealth. You took a piece
of metal costing ten cents, put ten cents' worth of labour
into stamping it, shaping it and spraying it, and ended up
with a piece of metal worth a dollar. That was wealth
creation in a nutshell. Not chasing bits of paper up and
down Wall Street. Which was why, despite the demands of
his business, his great love was to spend his weekends in his
fully equipped model engineering workshop. At first he had
made real toys for his grandchildren, but the death of his
wife, Judith, after forty years together left a huge hole in his
life which he filled by building models of great American
airplanes. His latest and most ambitious project, now nearing
completion after two years, was a twenty-fourth scale
model of Howard Hughes's Spruce Goose - the biggest
twentieth-century airplane ever built. Accurate right down
to the markings on the flight instruments.
Howard Hughes . . . Now there was a guy who understood
the importance of making things, whether it was
movies, airplanes, or semiconductors. When the Spruce
Goose was finished, Joe's next project would be the Spirit of
35
St Louis - although Lindbergh was one of his lesser heroes.
Joe's love of aviation was, literally, in his blood. His
parents had lived and breathed airplanes. In early 1939 the
newly married couple had packed their lives into two cheap
fibre suitcases, taken one last look at the SenaWarsaw
Aviation plant where they worked and left for France. At
Cherbourg they boarded the Queen Elizabeth and sailed
into New York six days later. Joe was born in 1945, after
they had moved to Seattle and secured good jobs in the
design office.
At first Joe hadn't wanted to follow his parents into the
company. The exact moment when he changed his mind was
still thrillingly fresh in his memory after more than half a
century. On 9 February 1969 he had accompanied his
parents to the plant to watch the unveiling of the project
that they had been working on for three years: the rollout
and test flight of the world's first Jumbo jet - the mighty
Page 29
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]