Kelly

by Clarence L. Johnson

  Portrait of a reflective man: Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson.

  © 1985 by Smithsonian Institution

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging

  in Publication Data

  Johnson, Clarence L.

  More than my share.

  1. Johnson, Clarence L. 2. Aeronautical

  engineers—United States—Biography.

  3. Aeronautics, Military—Research—United

  States. 4. Lockheed airplanes.

  I. Smith, Maggie. II. Title.

  UG626.2.J62A36 1985 629.13′;0092′4

  [B] 84-600316

  eISBN: 978-1-58834-360-4

  ISBN: 978-0-87474-564-1 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-0-87474-491-0 (pb)

  This is an electronic edition (ISBN 978-1-58834-360-4) of the original cloth edition.

  Book design by Christopher Jones

  www.smithsonianbooks.com

  v3.1

  To Nancy

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1. Poor But Not in Spirit

  2. A Good Move

  3. Becoming an Engineer

  4. A Growing Airplane Company

  5. The Good-Looking Young Paymaster

  6. Wiley, Amelia, and Others

  7. A Family of Aircraft

  8. War and Mass Production

  9. Into the Unknown

  10. The Big Time

  11. The Jet Age—and the First “Skunk Works”

  12. Lessons from Korea

  13. Working with “Spooks”

  14. Blackbirds Fly Stealthily—

  Three Times the Speed of Sound

  15. In Sickness and in Health

  16. It’s No Secret

  17. Farewell, Sweetheart

  18. Defending Ourselves

  19. Technology and Tomorrow

  20. A Good Life

  Appendix: Awards and Honors

  Foreword

  MANY OF YOU, exclusive of true aviation buffs, who pick up this book may wonder who is “Kelly” Johnson? Simply to say that he is one of the most honored and highly successful aeronautical engineers, designers, and builders of aircraft of his or any other time is a fact that is only partially documented by some fifty awards and honors appended to this story. Webster defines genius as “extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative activity.” Though Kelly would deny it, the description fits him to a T.

  Aviation, however, is not all or perhaps even the most important element of this story. It is an essential ingredient and backdrop to the unique and insightful story of the man himself that covers a broad spectrum of interest to a wide range of readers. While the story is understated, the reader should be aware of the engineer’s penchant for letting the facts, without emphasis or embellishment, speak for themselves.

  I first met Kelly in September of 1945, and later had the distinct pleasure, privilege—and education—of working with him and the “Skunk Works” on an almost daily basis for eleven-plus years from 1955 through 1966. This carried us from almost the inception of the U-2, which incidentally was one of the great bargains the American taxpayer ever realized, to the YF-12, the interceptor that should have been built but wasn’t, and the first four years of the SR-71, the almost unbelievable “Black Bird”—among other projects. It was a unique and productive experience for me and most regrettably one that may never be repeated for this country. Simply put, Kelly’s real legacy is not nearly so much what he has accomplished, but much more how it was done. That is, generally outside—and in many cases in spite of—the so-called regular “system.”

  The U-2 and SR-71 are two examples of Skunk Works programs that came in on schedule and under contract costs. Still, despite disclaimers, the Skunk Works, Kelly’s brainchild—once described by Sen. Sam Nunn as a truly unique national asset and former Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard as a national treasure—to all intents and purposes has ceased to exist. This is an inexcusable and needless loss for the American taxpayer. Thoughtful readers will question the why of this, as well they should.

  This and a great deal more is here in the story of an extraordinary man who certainly has had more than his share of it all.

  Leo P. Geary

  Brigadier General, USAF (Ret.)

  Denver, Colo., 1984

  Introduction

  CLARENCE L. “KELLY” JOHNSON is the designer of the world’s highest-performance aircraft—the big bold “Blackbirds,” the SR-71 and YF-12—that were flying secretly at three times the speed of sound while other experts still were insisting that it was not feasible; and the graceful, glider-like U-2, which can attain altitudes admitted to be “above 80,000 feet.”

  He designed America’s first operational jet fighter, the F-80 Shooting Star. His dramatic twin-boomed P-38 Lightning fighter-interceptor of World War II was the first aircraft to encounter the phenomenon of “compressibility” as the wing’s leading edge built up supersonic air turbulence. He has contributed to the design of more than 40 aircraft, more than half being his original design.

  He holds every aircraft design award in the industry, some for the second and third time: the National Medal of Science; the National Security Medal; and the Medal of Freedom, the highest civil honor the President of the United States can bestow.

  His “Skunk Works” at Lockheed—more formally, Advanced Development Projects—is recognized worldwide as unique in its record for turning out “breakthrough” designs in minimal time and with maximum security. “Be quick, be quiet, be on time,” are Kelly’s watchwords.

  When the Russians in 1960 exhibited to the public in Red Square the wreckage of the aircraft they billed as the U-2 in which they had downed Francis Gary Powers, Kelly’s response to press query when shown the photo was typically direct and dramatic: “Hell, no,” the aircraft designer barked. “That’s no U-2.”

  With wife Nancy Johnson, during 1983’s presentation by President Ronald Reagan of the National Security Medal.

  The Russians had downed the U-2, untouchable for years at its high altitude on reconnaissance flights over Russian territory; but Kelly blew their act. A designer who went into the factory and participated in every phase of design and development as well as production, he recognized immediately that the mangled parts the Russians had displayed were not from any U-2.

  Controversy is nothing new to this much honored engineer.

  In his first day as a just-graduated engineer on the job that was to last 44 years, he told his employers that the new, all-metal aircraft with which they planned to challenge the air transport field was unstable! While such instability was commonly accepted in aircraft of the 1930s, the young engineer stubbornly refused to accede to the view of the professors with whom he had performed wind tunnel tests on the model at the University of Michigan. They were willing to accept the imperfections. Kelly was not. He was right, of course. The reworked result was the first in the long line of twin-tailed Lockheed transports that would make the company’s name known around the world in the 1930s and ’40s. This characteristic behavior soon earned him the nickname, “the Old Goat,” among the Lockheed engineering staff.

  Kelly always held to his principles.

  He advised the U.S. Navy in the early ’50s that a vertically-rising aircraft for which his company had a development contract was unsafe, with the limited engine power then available, and should be abandoned.

  He refused to go ahead with a hydrogen-powered aircraft—ahead of its time in the late ’50s—and he turned back a development contract after initial work indicated the plane would be a “wide-bodied dog,” in the words of his successor at ADP.


  He returned to the U.S. government approximately $2 million saved on the $20 million U-2 contract, having produced an extra six aircraft for the same money intended to cover 20 aircraft.

  “I have known what I wanted to do ever since I was 12,” Johnson says.

  Now officially retired, he continues in an advisory capacity at Lockheed, where he maintains an office in the “Skunk Works.” He still works to a busy schedule, though not always now beginning at his once customary 6 a.m., the better to communicate with East Coast military offices operating with a three-hour headstart.

  This book is not intended to be a history of aviation nor a documentation of specific aircraft development. It is the personal reflection of one man in his time.

  Maggie Smith

  Sherman Oaks, Calif.

  1

  Poor But Not in Spirit

  NORTHERN MICHIGAN IN MID-WINTER is harsh, cold country to a young immigrant seeking to carve out a new life. My father didn’t choose it intentionally.

  In the year 1882, at age 24, he left the small city of Malmo in his native Sweden for a better life in the United States, leaving behind his intended bride, Christine Anderson. Sweden had universal military service. Peter Johnson was about to be conscripted into the army, and he did not want to carry a gun.

  He had saved $600 with which he intended to buy a farm in Nebraska. His future would be in the fertile plains of the Midwest.

  He got as far as Chicago before he found that all was not opportunity in the “new world.” There Peter fell in with bad company, some fellows ready to take advantage of an unworldly foreigner literally just off the boat. He paid them his $600, thinking he had bought the farm he wanted in Nebraska. His new friends put him on a train headed, instead, for upper Michigan. He got off at Marquette. It was winter and awfully cold, he thought, for Nebraska.

  When the truth became obvious, he was faced with the need to support himself in a strange country. He was a mason by trade, but the only work available there in midwinter was on the railroad, laying ties. That’s what he did for a time until he could make connections with a local construction company and work again as a bricklayer.

  It took several years before Peter could afford to send for Christine. They were married and settled in the small mining town of Ishpeming, not far from Marquette. That is where I was born, on February 27, 1910.

  I, Clarence Leonard Johnson, was the seventh in a family of nine children. We were very poor, and all of us learned early in life that as soon as we were able we had to help earn what we needed.

  My earliest memories of my birthplace are of how beautiful it was. Even the long railroad trains, their cars piled with iron ore, going off both east and west seemed beautiful to me as I watched them from the bluffs above town. I’d go out into the woods, summer and winter, and always had a little hideaway camp where I could go with my dog, Putsie.

  We lived in a succession of three large houses, all rented. I remember best the last of these, a big frame house painted green, on top of a hill, on Summit Street. It was bitter cold in the winter. To fuel our wood-burning stove, my father would pick a bright clear day to hitch our horse, Mac, to the cutter and drive four or five miles into the woods to cut birch. When I was about eight years old, I began to join him regularly. It was so cold that my mother put a jug of hot water by my feet, then wrapped me up to keep me warm. She packed our lunch in a dinner pail, too—some hot coffee and sandwiches. We would look for a fallen tree since that was easiest to cut up. We had a crosscut saw, and I would try to help by pulling one end. But my father generally did a lot of the cutting with an ax. Our day’s work done, we’d pile our wood in the back of the cutter—at least three wheelbarrows-full—and head home with a comfortable feeling of accomplishment. Our Christmas tree each year came from the woods, too. I never recall seeing anyone else on these forays. The area was not very widely settled.

  We had both wood and coal-burning stoves for cooking and heating in that house, and we got our coal in another thrifty manner, picking it up from the railroad tracks. The train always dropped some coal, and one gunnysack-full was enough for our needs for a day. My sister Alice and I would take our sleds—we each had one—and gunnysacks and fill them up after school. The engineers came to know us; and if there wasn’t a supply of coal that had fallen off the trains, they would throw some off.

  The severe winter weather made it difficult for my father to work. Snow and ice would form on the bricks so that they could not be joined. But on relatively warm days, he would solve that problem with an old, empty 50-gallon oil drum. He knocked holes in the bottom to get a draft and built the biggest fire he could inside, having placed the frozen bricks around the outside. Then, before ice could refreeze on them, he would lay the bricks as quickly as possible. His work always was subject to weather; but when he worked, my father could lay 2,000 bricks in a day.

  My mother worked, too, in addition to raising a family and running the house. She took in washing, from the wealthier people in the town. Each basket of clothes brought in a couple of dollars. Every day she washed, and not in a washing machine but on a scrub board. Our basement wasn’t large enough to hold a wash; so every day, summer and winter, she would hang it outside.

  In winter, of course, it froze and had to be ironed dry. The older girls, Ida, Freda, and Agnes, helped with this work. I did, too. I picked up and delivered laundry at least a couple of times each week in my wagon, or on my sled in winter. I did not like to be seen doing this, and I remember particularly one time when there was a Saint George Day parade and the main streets were full of people. I took back alleys all the way home. I vowed then that one day I’d return to Ishpeming and not on the back streets but the best streets.

  I loved the woods surrounding Ishpeming and always had a secret hideaway there in a place southeast of town that I called Surprise Valley, because it was pretty well hidden from view. I’ve gone out in winter when it was ten degrees above zero. I wouldn’t build a fire but would listen to the trees cracking in the cold, try to read fox and other animal tracks in the snow, and chase a few rabbits. I learned how to build a lean-to from reading a book on Indian explorers. I’d cut pine boughs, run a sturdy limb two or three inches in diameter between two adjacent trees, then weave the boughs together stems up, so the branches would fall down like shingles. It made a shelter that was quite waterproof. The same technique of weaving boughs made a floor. I’d leave the front open so I could watch the animals. And I usually had a little food stored there—mostly just some bread and butter in a tin can. When Putsie was with me, we’d share it. I’d make a new lean-to every winter, because in summer it would be torn down or dried out. It took me only about a day to build one with a lath hatchet borrowed from my brother Emil.

  School always was interesting to me. I was eager to go and would show up early to be first in line to enter the building. But there was one fellow who took to pushing me out of the way when he arrived later. And he made the mistake of calling me Clara for Clarence. His name was Cecil. Unfortunately for me, he was about a foot taller than I was, a long gawky kid; so when I realized that action had to be taken, I knew it would take some planning.

  The occasion came during one recess in the schoolyard when words came finally to blows. The other kids pushed us together, and I knew there was only one way I could lick this guy. So I kicked him behind the knee to trip him, then jumped on him when he fell. There was a loud popping noise. I had broken his leg.

  The principal, Mrs. Lacey, and my second grade teacher, Miss Hass, didn’t quite know what to do. There was Cecil with a broken leg, and I not only admitted doing it but on purpose. They spanked me over the knuckles so hard with a ruler that it broke. But I didn’t cry and that brought me favor with the other children.

  Cecil was from one of the wealthier families in town and I expected his family to raise trouble with ours. I was somewhat afraid to go home. It was the only time I ever feared a whipping. Despite my mother’s assurances when I got there
that she was not going to spank me, I announced that I wasn’t coming in, and I ran off to my hidden camp in the woods, where I spent the night. It was late spring; so it wasn’t cold. Putsie and I shared the store of old bread and butter I had there. I returned about three o’clock the next afternoon, having missed school, but warmly welcomed at home.

  When I returned to school, the kids had decided that I didn’t act like a Clarence and should have a good fighting Irish name. There was a song popular at that time, “Kelly from the Emerald Isle,” and they sang a verse about “Kelly with the green necktie.” They named me Kelly. It stuck.

  We were really hard-pressed for money in the early years, and my mother not only took in washing but scrubbed floors. One day she got a job to scrub the floor of one of the big stores in town, Sellwood’s. It looked to me like almost an acre of floor area. But Alice and I joined my mother at the job and in one day we had the oak floors scrubbed clean.

  We were so poor at that time that when we would take a can to buy kerosene for our lamps—for 15 or 20 cents—we would plug the spout with a potato, then when we had carried the kerosene home, cut away any part of the potato that had been sloshed with kerosene and save the rest to be eaten.

  To help with finances, I spent one summer with an aunt in the farming community of Sands, less than 30 miles east and slightly south of Ishpeming. I earned my keep there, doing things like raising the gear ratio to 20-to-one on the cream separator to make that a lot easier to operate. I also earned $31 picking wild blueberries. I got $1.00 a peck, which took a whole day to collect. When I went home at the end of the season, I handed the entire $31 to my mother. There were tears in her eyes as she thanked me, she was so touched that I had not kept anything at all for myself. No contribution I have ever made since has made me feel happier; none has been more important to me.

  The next summer Alice and I decided we both would like to make some more money that way. She and I were only three years apart in age and she was my closest companion in the family. Clifford and Helen, seven and eight years younger, were too young to keep up with us.