When I graduated in 1943, I expected to be received with open arms by some academy as an aspiring science teacher, but this was during WWII and academies were not hiring teachers.
So I went home to Pasadena a really discouraged, unemployed college graduate. My mother's house was near Lake Avenue, a transportation thoroughfare with lots of buses and streetcars, and about four blocks from the California Institute of Technology, better known as Cal. Tech.
Every morning I would see hordes of well dressed men and women walking toward Cal Tech, and every evening they would stream back toward the buses on Lake Avenue. "Those aren't students," I thought to myself, "They're working guys and gals. Perhaps I could get a job there. After all, I do have a degree in physics."
I went to the college office and was told that they were not hiring anyone, but that I might apply at the Naval Research Project which was on campus. I later found out that the US Navy had converted the four story building, which previously held the huge Van de Graaf generator, the first atom smasher, into an office building and research center for the pilot production of barrage rockets. When I applied for a job, I was interviewed by Nobel Laureate, Dr. Lauritsen, and as I gave him my application, I fearfully informed him that I was a Seventh-day Adventist and couldn't work on Saturday. I expected a negative reaction, so I was very pleased when he said, "Oh, don't worry about that, you're not punching a clock, you can come in on Sunday instead."
Part of my job was proof-testing each lot of rocket ammunition. This entailed driving out to the firing range located at Goldstone, a dry lake in the Mojave Desert. Fortunately, the tests were always on Sunday, so I would drive out to Goldstone on Saturday night, conduct the test on Sunday, and return on Sunday night. All of my colleagues were jealous of my excursions while they were slaving away at their desks. The desert road circled another dry lake, so I would sometimes leave the road and take a shortcut across the lake, a rather exciting experience after dark. I was just there as an observer since the tests were conducted by a full-time crew. No live ammunition was used, but spotters behind the launcher and along the side of the range would report their sightings of the dust cloud at the point of impact. These sightings were transmitted to the plotting room where they were used to locate the exact point of the impact by triangulation. If anything went wrong, such as a rocket blowing up on the launcher or flying wlldly off course, I had to include this in my report. Usually when this happened the whole lot of ammunition was sent back for reprocessing.
One time we tested a new rocket that was five inches in diameter and five feet long. When it blasted off, the sound was so impressive that one of the crew exclaimed in awe, "Holy Moses!" From then on it was called the Holy Moses.
