First of all I did not meet this aircraft at El Segundo. Secondly, It was not the winner of the VAL competition necessary to continue in production after 1965. So how did I come to park outside 3855 Lakewood Boulevard in Long Beach in May of 1965 and approach the guard shack? I had a book called the "College Placement Annual." It had names and addresses of industrial and research businesses and institutions in various states and regional centers. My uncle sold American United life insurance in Canoga Park, California and had been in the USMC. The SNAP orbital nuclear reactor had just been cancelled. Research locations were looking mostly for technicians to work with PhDs. A lot of new apartments had been built in anticipation of a major boom in rentals. I had rented a small studio apartment on the corner of Saticoy and Topanga Canyon in the San Fernando Valley. The movie stars were just over the nearby hills on the beach in Malibu. No responses had come back from the month of daily interviews and guard desk contacts. What did I see in a trip way past Los Angeles and Santa Monica down the San Diego Freeway to a production plant built during WW-II? It was big and a lot of people worked there. So I fired up my now almost ten years old Chevrolet bored out 265 V-8 and put the Borg-Warner T-10 aluminum case 4 speed transmission into the 2.20:1 low gear and headed out onto Saticoy. About 30 minutes later I was turning off the Freeway onto Lakewood Blvd. With traffic maybe an hour would be required and I would pass through the mountains when I came back before turning toward Ventura. The commute was feasible. I would later meet folks from Woodland Hills and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. This trip got me the attention of Plans and Operations Analysis. I took the elevator to the fifth floor of what was then at 9 stories, due to earthquake limits, one of the tallest buildings in the Los Angeles basin. Wow! I could look out of the North windows at the peaks of Mt. Baldy and San Gorgonio where the speed of light experiment had been done. Smog was back a ways more over Artesia than where I was. The offices were cubicles made of unfinished tan Hexcell panels with ripple glass on top. The men I met were interested in what I had studied about atomic structure. They were working on stochastic processes. Eventually, I was in the office with a chain smoker who had graduated from Berkeley and was very tall. He grilled me about probability. Then I was out and on the street again. My car sat outside the guard shack waiting. I began my new assignment in building 13. It was one of the huge production barns about 1000 feet long and 200 feet wide. Inside was a tarpaulin about half way back behind which came sounds of machining. At the door end there were walls of ordinary building height free standing in a small maze off in one corner. I entered that once to be told that Bendix would occupy part of this. Then I was taken to some drafting boards laid on top of half height file cabinets. There were several stools and a few abandoned drafting machine arms with steel tape bands. This would be my station until I was given a space up in building 18A, the tower. There were two ways out building 13. You could take a tram that would around and crossed under Lakewood to the commercial production buildings on the other side then came back under the street again to wind among other buildings to a tram stop outside 13. The second way was to walk directly following painted lines across alleys lined with racks of sheet metal parts and through production lines one of which was for the A-4 and had been transplanted from El Segundo. Here the view was mostly of fuselage completions in two parts. The engineering laboratory was in the other end of the building. For now I did not need to go there. My car knew the tall dynamic testing machines from the University which had surplus machines from Hydramatic. There were no welders. My car was the last with a riveted frame. I had chosen it especially for that feature. The Champion Drivematic which drilled, reamed and drove rivets was across the roadway and you could hear it all over the plant. The winner of the VAL was going to be late. Meanwhile a new model of the Skyhawk was being put into production with a slightly uprated engine. The higher gross weight that had gotten a Navy reprimand for insistent marketing was to be forgotten forever. For now I had no need to meet anyone on the program. What brought me into the program was a need to chose avionics to compete with the VAL that was being proposed for another turbofan and an avionics referred to as, ILAAS. The biscuit in the nose and the AJB-3 and computer in the spine were to be discarded and a new inertial platform and digital computer as well as some sort of laser ranging system might be a candidate for installation. Meanwhile, the TA-4F was a valid trainer version and no trainer version of the VAL had been made. A cost-effectiveness argument could be made for the USMC operating from land bases on something called, SATS. I was sent to a building leased from North American Downey right across from the Apollo capsule facility. The only elevator was for freight so I had to climb several flights of stairs every morning and noon. I am showing you the Skyhawk before the A-4M. No version of the Skyhawk stayed in inventory until Desert Storm. The guide at Pensacola museum made that clear to me as we looked at the Blue Angels display of four Skyhawks. The photograph I have here is from the flight deck of the carrier Lexington in Corpus Christi. Just to show how the type survives today.