The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 12: At the Drawing Board, Inside the Sheffield Steel Field Trailer at Pad B.
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And as you sit at your desk, and a moment of inactivity presents itself, you pull out your trusty Zeiss Ikon Contessa, and snag a shot of Danny Sheffield while he's trapped there right in front of you, going over some damn thing on the blueprints while he discusses the matter with somebody on the other end of the phone, and since he is Dan Sheffield Senior's son, and since Dan Sheffield Senior owns Sheffield Steel, you might safely presume that he's looking at something depicted on a drawing that either requires further clarification for the people back in Sheffield's fabrication shop in Palatka, Florida, to actually be able to fabricate it, or perhaps there's an issue with a piece of steel that's been delivered to the pad and something's not right about it somehow, and that might be because the drawing was wrong or unclear, or the underlying engineering was wrong or unclear, or maybe the guys on the shop floor were simply wrong, or perhaps something up on the tower is wrong, or maybe he's just ordering pizza.
I'm sure I'll never be able to know.
Danny Sheffield was fully competent but never pushed, never lorded it over, never played the "My daddy owns the company" card, and was never anything but easy and engaging, in a relaxed low-profile way. He was pretty fun to be around, and we got along together really well.
You just saw the picture of my desk, and this picture has very clearly been taken by myself, while sitting in my chair, looking south toward my boss Dick Walls' little office space in the far end of the trailer across the open center area, which was dominated by the makeshift drawing table which the blueprints Danny has a hand on were laid out upon, and I'm squinting as hard as I can at this picture, trying to figure out if it's a detail drawing or an erection drawing, but I can't quite see well enough, but then again just the generalized look of the lines on that sheet of paper give me to believe it's a detail drawing and that would stand very much to reason, 'cause it was the detail drawings which were used to actually fabricate the stuff which was then delivered to the pad and placed on the tower in accordance with what was on the engineering drawings, and why would somebody on the shores of the beautiful St. Johns river in Palatka, Florida, care about how something was going to be getting hung by a crew of ironworkers a couple of hundred feet up in the air, when there's plenty more than enough trouble right here trying to figure out what the draftsman was thinking when he drew this impossible thing, and now everything on the shop floor has come to a halt, and Dan Senior is NOT happy, and I guess we better call down to the pad, 'cause Danny's down there today, and maybe HE can find out for us and let us get back to work before Dan Senior comes around the corner and kills all of us for wasting outrageous sums of his money, uselessly standing around out here like a bunch of department-store mannequins.
And Dan Senior was one of those people...
Dan Senior always scared the hell out of me, but the good news is that he hardly ever paid a personal visit to the launch pad, which means he hardly ever scared the hell out of me... but when he did pay a visit to the launch pad...
...he was never sharp or brusque, never dismissive or domineering, and when you spoke with him he always made it clear that you had his full and complete attention while you did so, but he also had this frighteningly low, oh so very low ambiance about him, and he was ruddy-complected, lean but not any kind of light or thin, retaining a full compliment of thinnish reddish-blond lightly-curled hair on his aging head, and he was Southern and he moved with that peculiar slow southernness that certain high-end people from the South evidence, which somehow always manages to allow them to get three times as much stuff done in the same amount of time it would take you or me, working at our very highest speed, but it was his voice that was the scariest thing about him.
You could hardly hear the guy when he talked.
He'd move across the room with that syrupy slow-motion way he had, and he'd... not whisper... no, it was definitely not a whisper of any kind, and instead it had this sort of muted low-frequency tone to it, but there was nothing heavy or basso profundo about any of it, and it was very much a low-decibel kind of thing, so low that you had to pay very close attention to it, and it invariably caused you, and everybody else in the room, to all go very quiet, and listen to whatever it was he was saying very hard, even when it was only, "Good morning," and I don't believe I ever heard the guy waste so much as a single word, ever, on anything, which meant that his word-count was really low, and every single word carried significant meaning, and... and I've met a few other people in my life with a somewhat similar mien about them, since, but none of them ever came close to the just... presence... of Dan Sheffield Senior.
I've got a feeling that being Dan Sheffield Senior's kid was not the easiest task in the world.
Danny was Good People, but Dan Senior was just so brutally overwhelming, without ever showing any sign of actually intending to be that way, in this completely weird Twilight Zone way that he had, that...
And I dunno, but I've very definitely got a feeling that being Dan Sheffield Senior's kid was not the easiest task in the world.
And then, on a different day, there are different people, and you once again pull out your trusty camera and grab another frame as they are working at the drawing table. We're all on really good terms together, and nobody minds because in your present woeful state of completely-untrained ignorance, it's not like you're wasting time with the camera or anything like that.
Your job, during moments like this, is to let the adepts do what needs to be done.
Your job, you glorified answering machine you, is to keep your mouth shut and stay the hell out of the way, while real work gets done, and so long as you're properly out of the way, seated at your own desk, who cares if you pull out a small camera, which didn't even have flash attachment, point it at what's right there in front of you, and make it go 'click' while you were continuing to stay the hell out of everybody's way?
No problem.
None at all.
And here we are, all these decades later, with the most mundane of all possible things, a photograph of the insides of a contractor's field trailer out at the Launch Pad, giving us a view of the insides of things, including a few of the very high-end people who frequented places like this.
And they all look just as normal as could be...
...but they're not.
They're not normal.
This is the real deal as practiced by the real people, despite impossibly-misleading mundane appearances to the contrary.
On the left, bemusedly watching over things inside of his trailer, is Dick Walls, who may as well have been my second father.
You'd never know it to look at him.
Not the least hint was discernible.
He was an ex-Pittsburgh guy, who grew up in the city, and wanted a way out.
And he went to school, and became proficient in drafting, back when it was all done by hand.
And he told me that he got good at it. Structural drafting. And he kept on with his education, and added a bit of structural engineering to his personal toolkit, too. While he was still "at the board." At the drawing board. And it came to a point where, one day, he had a sit-down with his boss, and advised that he had no proper future being a draftsman for the rest of his life, and he by now had enough engineering training, and management training too, and he could no longer expect himself to remain seated "at the board" and he needed to be either moved up the ranks, or he'd have to look for more rewarding work elsewhere...
...and his boss agreed with him, and placed him in a position of engineering management, and since they were in Pittsburgh, which back in those days was the center of steel production in the United States of America, and since a BIG part of steel production revolves around coal, he found himself managing and engineering the production of full-scale facilities for handling coal in bulk, and bulk coal is an astoundingly complex thing involving mile-long railroad trains, and huge structures for picking up whole rail cars filled with coal and rolling them over upside down to dump the coal into whatever gigantic hopper, or gigantic conveyor system, where it would be funneled from there into some blast furnace, or coke oven, or god knows what other Armageddon-like infrastructure which had as its business the no-fucking-around production of steel in stupefying quantities, enough to build whole cities out of, and the whole thing is strictly business, and RW did just fine for himself rubbing shoulders and getting it done, with the people at the very top of that particular pyramid.
Until one day, he was made aware that they were also making gigantic complex steel infrastructures and outré things down in Florida to support America's burgeoning Space Program in a mad race to first catch up with, and then surpass, the Russians who had somehow managed to catch everybody napping and got way ahead of them, and they were dangerous sonofabitchs, and this whole brand-new rocket thing was a way of hurling thermonuclear warheads a third of the way around the planet in a half hour, and now all of a sudden we need to get going with this stuff, and money started flowing like a crazed Niagara Falls, and now they're talking about putting people on top of these insane things and maybe even flying them to the goddamned MOON of all psychotic destinations, and then the money started flowing even harder, and Dick Walls found himself down in Florida working as project manager in the Heyl & Patterson fabrication shop on Merritt Island right next door to Cape Canaveral, which is where all the furious work was being done at the time, and...
...building launch pads.
And eventually they actually made it to the Moon, and back, and all of a sudden the race that was once so hot had now gone cold, and attentions, and money, were shifted elsewhere, and HP eventually folded up their tent in Merritt Island, and Dick Walls wound up working for Sheffield Steel...
And not all too very long after that, the fabric which was being created by The Fates intertwined the two threads, one with Dick Walls' name on it and another with James MacLaren's name on it...
And you occasionally find yourself coming bolt wide-awake at 3am not believing ANY of it, and you have to settle yourself back down, and sometimes sleep returns, and sometimes it doesn't, but either way, come the dawning of the next morning, you still wind up heading north on A1A to an undeniable destination, and all of the people you find out there seem to regard you as being one of them...
...and you find yourself being forced, against your own better judgment, into believing every last bit of it...
And there's Gene Hajdaj to the right of RW, looking away from the camera toward whatever it is that's on the drawing table, giving his full attention to whatever it is that Chris Miller is going on about, and which is also what's putting that bemused look on Dick Walls' face, and Eugene Hajdaj is another one of those insanely high-powered people, except that he's got an exterior aspect that would in every way have you believing that he's just some mild-mannered schmoe, with nothing whatsoever going on about him that might in any way be exceptional to the slightest degree...
...but we're already learning that appearances, out in this place, are not to be trusted, and Hajdaj can, while continuing to maintain that outrageously-deceptive mild-mannered exterior, think you under the table, and from there, right on down into a hole in the ground, and never break the least sweat while doing it, never lose the the amazingly soft tones of his voice, and never lose that slight hint of the very friendly and inviting smile that's always flickering out there around the corners of his mouth and eyes, almost unseeable but not quite, and never losing the knowing twinkle in his eyes, either.
Hajdaj is ferociously smart and just soft-pedals the hell out of it.
He's got nothing at all to prove to anybody, and doesn't really give a shit. He's already there, and he knows it, so why worry about it? Why make a big demonstration about it? Why bother? And so he doesn't.
He's one of Reynolds Smith and Hills (that's their name down in the title block of all the 79K drawings I've been linking to in this thing, and these are their drawings, and this whole thing is their engineering) structural engineers, and is tack sharp.
Hajdaj is also that exemplar of "the exception that proves the rule" when it comes to engineers.
You've already been given a few hints, and there will be much more as we go forward with this thing, regarding engineers.
Not all of which is nice, and in fact, some of it is downright unpleasant.
But not Hajdaj.
Saintly.
Probably the best single word, I'm guessing, if you were forced into having to use just a single word to describe him.
And I suppose it was that saintly nature that caused him to show my own unworthy ass grace upon grace upon grace in the form of gently helping me to...
At first, even see that there was a path there to begin with, and then, once I had apparently demonstrated enough lucidity of thought to give him to believe that I had actually located the damn path, take me along it, showing me the wonders that were hidden there around every new bend and beyond every new hill, never pushing, never becoming overbearing, never overwhelming me, everlastingly smooth and gracious about it.
And to have crossed paths with either one of these people, Dick Walls or Gene Hajdaj, would have been a stroke of good fortune beyond believing, but somehow, The Fates wove both of their threads into the fabric, right along with mine.
My debt shall never be repayable, and I know it.
And here we see that I've somehow managed to disrupt Gene's thought process, and he's turned toward me, just forming the words of something perhaps faintly sarcastic but very much kindly-spirited too, funny in a low-key way, and engaging, wishing my worthless ass to feel part of this, despite the clear and obvious fact to one and all that I'm so far out of my depth as to cause it to be ludicrous that I'm even in the same room with these people. And you can see it all, and more, in his eyes.
Chris Miller continues to hold his vice-like grip on the problem at hand, and I can only wish I'd had the chance to get to know him better, but he was more mechanical as opposed to Gene's structural (he was the one who designed the PCR Main Doors, and the Extensible Planks, and so very much more), and I was on a structural path, and for that reason our direct interactions were correspondingly reduced, and there was an awful lot there that got away from me.
And at the time it all seemed so routine. It all seemed so day-to-day.
And there was only so much of you.
And there was only so much of them.
And the underlying hum of urgency was completely undetectable at the time, and you missed it completely.
And it's only now, forty full years later, that you can suddenly hear it.
Suddenly feel it.
And you realize just how much you failed to absorb at the time.
And now it's gone.
Forever.
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