Re: One of SPF Senior Memebers Gets Some Ink
marauder2048 said:
Have you ever attempted to track down and interview some of the people behind these projects? Their families alone might appreciate (and help fund) some insight into what grandpa did at Convair etc.
I have many times, almost universally a disaster. My interest is in the machine, not the politics or personalities, so that's a problem. I'm not a People Person, so that's a problem (I *suck* at interviewing). Most of the time when I've contacted the Actual People and ask them about Orion or Dyna Soar or whatever, the responses are... paranoid. "Why do you want to know about this top secret thing I worked on? How do you even know that the project existed? Do you work for the Chinese? I'm calling the FBI!"
Once I hunted down a Relevant Historical Figure for something I was working on. Couldn't find him, but found his son. Who, to all appearances, *hated* him. Finally got put in touch with The Guy, who was in a group home for people with severe Alzheimer's. That was cheery.
I've had an on/off correspondence with A Relevant Person who is (or at least was, dunno) pushing 100. And it soon became clear to me that his claims were entirely untrustworthy, to the point of being utter BS.
Thrice. THREE TIMES! I've been in the process of a correspondence with A Relevant Person, when all of a sudden the letters/emails stopped coming. Because they friggen' *died.*
The theory "you could get a whole lot of good info/context from The People or from Their Families" certainly is a valid one. Lots of authors have had great success with it. I haven't. I'm'a gonna stick with documentation, I think.
Most of the people who would know about these things first hand are likely dead. Dyna Soar and Orion were more than *fifty* years ago, putting many of the junior engineers well into their seventies and eighties, senior engineers and managers in their nineties and beyond. And the extra sad thing is that I've found that for the most part their families don't give a damn about the programs. I suspect a lot of that is due to the simple fact that the Relevant People didn't really talk about them... they were classified, after all, and most programs are failures (either technically or politically), and that, I can say from experience, is a bummer. And so they don't tell their families a whole lot about it, and any documentation they may have brought home don't mean anything to Junior. Most of my experience with the families of Relevant People has been on ebay, when they're selling of Dad's or Grandad's stuff. They have the impression that it's cool, but they don't know squadoo about it.
