August 24, 2005

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Palo Alto Online

On Deadline: Moffett's Hangar One -- inside or out, the unlikeliest historical landmark

by Jay Thorwaldson

As we began pulling together the elements of today's story on the huge Hangar One at Moffett Field, I recalled a phone call I received four decades ago.

It was from the PIO -- public information officer -- at Moffett, when it was still a Naval Air Station, then housing a squadron of P3 Orion cold-war sub-hunter planes, listening for Soviet submarines far out into the Pacific Ocean. The Navy journalist, a friend, asked if I'd be interested in an inside, or topside, look at the hangar that few ever got to see. I was then covering Mountain View, Moffett and NASA's Ames Research Center for the erstwhile Palo Alto Times, before inheriting the Palo Alto beat in 1966. "I think I can get clearance to take you up on top during next weekend's air show," he said. Sure, I replied. So after depositing my family at a good viewing location in the public stands, the PIO and I headed in through the massive doors, so heavy they roll on train tracks, and walked to the center of the hangar. There we climbed into an unlikely elevator, which hung from the slanted walls and -- as I recall -- was all made of a metal mesh, including the floor. With alarming jerks, clanking and rattling, a cable hoist began pulling us skyward. We saw the concrete floor recede beneath us as we rose the 200 feet toward the rounded ceiling. We passed catwalks leading off at different levels, and I noted that on every flat or rounded surface there was a build-up of more than a quarter inch of black, greasy-looking dust -- years of buildup laced with soot from engine exhausts from uncountable engines. A few months before, I had written about testing one of those vertical-take-off-and-landing crafts inside the hangar. But, I thought, there must be exhaust residue from World War II planes that used to fly over my family home in Los Gatos -- and waggle their wings when my older sisters would climb out on the roof and wave bedsheets as they flew to and from carriers anchored off Monterey. It was a patriotic war. We had a small dog that would "sit" and "salute" with her right paw. But inside the hangar , everything looked toxic, felt toxic, smelled toxic. It is not a surprise that we now know the hangar itself is made of toxic materials. We tried not to touch anything as we clanked to a stop and walked out onto the topmost catwalk, also mesh as I recall and narrower than I would have liked. Perhaps it was just the narrowness than made me think I could see through it. We walked gingerly to the middle, then climbed a trapeze-like 15- or 20-foot steel ladder to a trapdoor onto the roof. We ambled down to the end. People pointed at us; they seemed very small. We climbed onto the huge doors, kept ajar on sunny, warm days to prevent rain clouds from forming inside. We were the only ones who had a 360-degree view of the Blue Angels as they circled the hangar, and of the mountains west and east from which the hangar was -- is -- visible. Clanking back down, we marveled at how huge the airship U.S.S. Macon had to be to fill the space inside prior to its 1933 crash. We walked past the Orions parked along the sides, sophisticated listening machines in a stealthy war. The Macon crashed off Point Sur long before I was born. But the Times rented a back office from a real estate broker on Castro Street in Mountain View. He had served briefly on the Macon, and filled me in on its life and death, of the enmity some admirals held for lighter-than-air craft that contributed to its demise. But I clearly recall the much smaller blimps -- large balloons without internal girders that dirigibles had -- that were housed in the rectangular hangars to the south of Hangar One. My real estate friend also served on those, doing coastal patrol during World War II, shutting down the engines and letting them drift along. Japanese submariners feared blimps. It was a wartime secret that they were virtually unarmed sitting ducks -- for once a submarine saw one and dove the heavily armed bombers soon showed up to pound it, sometimes to death. The blimps got the credit. But subs weren't all the young sailors were watching for, my friend recounted. Sometimes they would cruise low, just skimming the tops of breakers along the coast, rising up for jutting peninsulas and, with some regularity, surprising lovers and nude sunbathers. Racy stuff for the early 1940s. Yet my favorite blimp story was told me by the woman who during "the war" had rented a house I used to own in the Willows area of Menlo Park, a Mrs. Tuttle, whose husband worked at Lockheed Aircraft and had a small jazz band on the side. She had dropped by in the mid-1970s with a second husband and asked to see her old house. One sunny spring day, she recounted as we shared coffee and memories, she was hanging out clothes when she noticed a blimp circling far above. It spiraled down, engines roaring, until she became scared, wondering if it might crash. Then a hand reached out a small window and dropped a slip of paper. It fluttered to the ground. It was a love poem -- from an anonymous sailor who saw a vision of a young woman in a spring dress with long brown hair, hanging out clothes on a breezy day. If Hangar One qualifies as historically significant, perhaps it is not just because of its marvelous size and visibility but because it symbolizes an era of national innocence -- misplaced in the darker and murkier times to follow, then and now.

Editor Jay Thorwaldson can be e-mailed at jthorwaldson@paweekly.com.

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