The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 11: MacLaren's Desk in the Sheffield Steel Field Trailer at Pad 39-B.
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And I would come back down off the tower, after having done who-knows-what, and this would be waiting for me.
Welcome to my world.
You are seeing it exactly as it existed.
I've always been a little weird about never touching that which I photograph. It is a bit of a compulsion I've always had, and I've always regarded the least disturbance to anything I photograph as sort of cheating. As a thing that in the end, winds up being self-defeating in the exact same manner that any other form of cheating winds up being self-defeating. Winds up depriving the cheater from ever knowing what's actually going on anywhere at all beyond the dangerously-narrow scope of their own lies. Leaving them too far out, sitting on a branch that is far too slender, and which will break just as soon as any additional load is placed upon the cheater, outside of those very-narrow limits, of the noose of bullshit, which they have willingly and deliberately put around their own necks. A thing that destroys the original truth and replaces it with something false, removing all chance of knowing or understanding what actually existed, and replacing it with a thing that never existed. Why people do this sort of thing I will never understand, and it has always perplexed me deeply as to why people would go after their own eyes with a sharp stick, in the interests of bullshit and false appearances, everlastingly trying to get something for nothing under false pretenses.
Ah well.
And the original centerpoint of my world, and the whole reason my world here even existed in the first place, was that black rotary-dial phone.
Everything else flowed from that single object. That single premise.
The flow of things wound up taking me for a breathtaking distance, along fantastically braided and branching pathways into far-distant realms that I would never in my lifetime have imagined I would ever visit, or even imagine that such places existed at all, but in the end, it all flowed directly from that humble black telephone.
And by this time, still in the year of 1980, despite having first come in contact with that phone only nine months previously, clearly, as the least glance at this image will testify to, I had become much more than an answering machine. But my roots remained, and I was careful to never forget from where the first sprouts of what was to become, originally grew.
The desk and chair themselves were government/military function-above-form, incarnate.
Both were made of solid steel, and both were heavy, and the desk in particular was very heavy.
I'm quite sure that Sheffield picked them up used somewhere along the line, perhaps at a government surplus auction, or perhaps as outright giveaways that you encounter when large projects wrap up, and it's time to break everything down and get it the hell out of there so the people who will actually be using the facility you built can do so, and no end of large, heavy, unwieldy things simply get abandoned, it being cheaper for their original owners to simply walk away from them or give them to somebody, than it would be to properly disposition/store them for unknown periods of time on floorspace somewhere that an overhead was being paid upon for the duration, until they were next requisitioned out to the next project, which requisitioning also does not come at zero cost, and so it winds up being much cheaper and easier to simply let it all go.
The top of the desk was composed of a curious almost rubber, almost plastic, but really, not quite either one of those, sort of material, that things would not slide across. And it was just barely soft enough to take a lasting impression if something with a bit of an edge, or a point, was brought down upon it with any sort of sensible force.
And for this reason, you could not lay sheets of paper directly upon it, and expect to be able to write or sketch upon them because of the existing bumps and impressions and the not-quite-softness, but instead you had to work with paper tablets (a small one is nearly touching the base of the telephone), a clipboard (sitting to the right, as seen in this image, from the small tablet I just mentioned, with overturned stapler on it, as well as one of the ubiquitous three-sided architect's rulers that you would find all over the place out here, with multiple different measuring units along each edge), or simply lay your work down on one of the existing piles of paper, loose or in a manila folder.
The non-skid aspects of the desktop surface cause me to wonder if the desk's original purpose was perhaps naval, perhaps involving a setting where things would not always stay put, and might tend to wander around on a smooth surface if permitted to do so when the wind and water took a mind to become a bit energetic, and Sheffield Steel's fabrication shop was right on the water of the St. John's River in Florida, none too far upriver from Naval Station Mayport, in Jacksonville, Florida, which is a significant installation, and Wilhoit also did a lot of work on the water, and connections to things that may have started out their lives in marine environments are too easy to imagine, and imagining such things leads directly to wonderment as to who else may have availed themselves of these pieces of office furniture over the decades, in what places or facilities, and what may or may have transpired there, and what might have existed on the other side of the walls or bulkheads which defined the spaces in which they were located, but it is all locked unknowably away behind an opaque barrier of one-way time that shall never be opened, repeated, nor known.
Near the small tablet and the clipboard, a yellow pencil can be seen, and if you look close, you can see that it has one of those fitted-erasers that can be placed on the end of a pencil when the original eraser that came with the pencil has been worn down to an unusable patch of rubber with a flat surface, dead-level with the edge of the bit of metal which holds it in place, and no longer accessible to the surface of a sheet of paper as a result.
A lot of erasing was done. Things got checked. Things got laid down as pale preliminary sketches. Mistakes were made. And none of it was permitted to survive if for any reason it was found to be deficient.
And a lot of erasers were gone through as a result.
Spring-clips.
There could never be enough spring-clips for keeping fat stacks of loose paper together.
But, invariably, you would find yourself putting too much paper into an overburdened spring-clip, straining its capacity, and every once in a while, you would pick such a stack of paper up, only to have the sheets in the middle of the stack break free of their imprisonment and scatter all over the place, desktop, floor, drawing-table, you-name-it, to the sound of shouted cursewords and the sight of yourself stooped over the dozens, or even hundreds of wayward sheets, carefully putting it all back in its original order to the sound of yet more cursewords.
A partially-open desk drawer.
Containing within, common wood pencils, mechanical pencils, erasers, ball-point pens, felt-tip pens, rubber bands, spring-clips, paper clips, scotch tape, extra staples, notes and post-it pads and tablets and unknowable paperwork. Push-pins. Highlighter marking pens, yellow for steel delivered, pink for steel erected.
Car keys out in the open, exposed to all the terrible things that could oh-so-easily cause them to disappear, become lost, and thereby cause great consternation, gnashing of teeth, and the flow of cursewords that would accompany such an event.
Which causes me to surmise that I had just entered the trailer, keys-in-hand, tossed them casually on to the desk to free the hand that held them for other purposes, and was then struck by the idea, which came unasked-for, that this would make for a good photograph, fetched the camera from wherever it might have been (including hanging around my neck by its carrying strap), took the shot as-is, and then returned to my chair to get to work, placing the car keys into the tray in the desk drawer where they belonged, for safekeeping so as they would be right where they were supposed to be when next I needed them.
But this is all nothing more than a surmise.
I do not know.
I have no recollection of taking this photograph. None at all.
Down near the bottom left of the frame, a large hot-dip galvanized bolt with a smooth shank and a matching nut threaded upon it holds down some folders filled to overflowing with paper.
Every desk in a place like this has some trinket or other kicking around on it somewhere.
I had fallen in with structural steel people, so it would stand to reason that a few outsize structural bolts might be found, and indeed that was the case. This one looks like it's probably a hinge pin for a folding platform somewhere. Hole for a cotter pin. Smooth shank. Heavy-grade. Matches the description fairly well, but I have no recollection of how it came to wind up in my possession, alas.
Look diagonally across the desk to where the (unattached to anything) pencil sharpener is located below the calendar (showing December 1980 as the date, which affirms that I was still significantly less than one year old at this point), and look just behind the pencil sharpener. Up against the wall, is the nut for a much larger bolt, but it's dark, ungalvanized, and pretty nondescript in this image, despite its size.
Against the wall, abutting the large ungalvanized nut, the white cylinder of a rolled-up drawing patiently waits its turn to tell its story.
Back to the near corner of the desk, right next to the galvanized bolt, a dark longish rectangle also rests on top of the folder.
That brown rectangle is the cover for my calculator, which you can just see the end of, inside of it. Back in those days, calculators were still pretty new and marvelous (the business of taking a square root by simply pressing a button still fell more or less under the heading of sorcery back in those days) and this particular calculator, which was given to me by ex-wife number one in the days before the 'ex' appeared, was just about the same size and shape as a slide rule, because people were still unsure that an inscrutable electronic device might really be able to replace one. So the people who made the calculator sought to reassure those who still harbored doubts, by constructing it in the shape of the slide rules that it replaced. Imagine that. I got one hell of a lot of use out of that thing over the years, until I left it on the front seat of my VW Bug where I'd parked it on the pad deck one day, very near to where you saw it in the image on the previous page, up near the top of the frame, and then when I got back in the car, I sat down on it unwittingly and broke it in half. Ah well, so it must be.
Over by the pencil sharpener is a book. I'm quite sure it's a library book, and not anything directly related to the job. Back then, Cocoa Beach, despite being a very small town, had a marvelous library, and I churned through a tremendous amount of books that I was constantly checking out on a regular basis. And once my son became old enough to read, the churn doubled. We read a lot, and still do. Perhaps it is something by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. I was going through all of Solzhenitsyn's stuff back then, and still regard him as my favorite author, and Gulag Archipelago (which this book most definitely is not, although it might be The Cancer Ward, or perhaps The First Circle, but of course I cannot know at this time) remains as my all-time most-cherished piece of literature, and remains as the one piece of literature which has had the greatest effect upon my life. Over time, I read a lot of books during the hours I had no tasks to perform, and the phone wasn't ringing. My boss was not only fine with that, he actually encouraged it. My taste in reading material is almost exclusively non-fiction, so if I'm reading, I'm learning, and Dick Walls thought that was a good thing.
Next to the book is my thermos for nice cold milk. Across the desk, you can also see part of the Tupperware container that my ham sandwiches would wait for me inside of until lunch time. I ate a lot of ham sandwiches back then.
Metal in-and-out trays stacked one above the other.
With perhaps a nice ham sandwich, which I made for myself daily, fresh, every morning before heading up A1A to the Cape, occupying the top tray.
The paperwork and folders scattered across the desk are all shipping lists and associated paperwork that's required for keeping track of fabrication, delivery, and erection, with an eye towards overall job progress, precisely identifying and dealing with discrepancies of any kind, and liaison with NASA and all of the other contractors out at the Pad and elsewhere, in an effort to keep things running smoothly and not costing Sheffield Steel any additional money as they did so, of all the zillion different pieces of iron it takes to build a launch pad with.
The far side of the desk was drawers, with the bottom drawer nice and deep, just right for keeping folders folders folders folders, filled with paper paper paper paper, tracking our portion of The Great Project going on outside the trailer, that which was, that which is, and that which shall be.
Behind you to the right, as you look at my desk, an open doorway leading to the room which occupied the north end of the trailer, a room filled with file cabinets, filled with paper paper paper paper, tracking our portion of The Great Project going on outside the trailer, that which was, that which is, and that which shall be.
And also filled with drawings in rolls and stacks and hanging from racks, drawings by the hundredweight, drawings in their thousands, tracking our portion of The Great Project going on outside the trailer, that which was, that which is, and that which shall be.
And shelves of binder-books with tens of thousands of pages of paper held in the clips. Specifications. Mill certs. Reference materials. And regular books. And catalogs. And suppliers directories. And a full set of Thomas Register back there somewhere, too. Tracking our portion of The Great Project going on outside the trailer, that which was, that which is, and that which shall be.
And in the far other end of the trailer, beyond the large central room which held my desk, and which also held our makeshift (but perfectly useful and serviceable) drawing table, just a bit of which can be seen beyond my desk, with every square inch of it covered in blue-line drawings, and which also held the Diazo machine against the opposite wall beneath the window, across from the drawing table, and also holding those racks and rolls comprising those hundreds of drawings which were active at the time, you would come to Richard Walls' office, which was filled up too, with more. Oh so very much more. Tracking our portion of The Great Project going on outside the trailer, that which was, that which is, and that which shall be.
By this time, even though I was still very new at the Pad, RW was making full use of my weird innate ability to functionally and constructively read blueprints, and I was by now doing things. You can see the blueprints laying there on the makeshift drawing table, right behind the black telephone. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of big 'F' size blueprints are required on a job of this size. And they were deeply-mysterious and complex pictures of the Secret Heart of Things, the innermost workings of a Launch Pad. How could I not be fascinated with the damn things? Who the hell gets to pour over drawings of a launch pad and then further gets to go out and climb around on the goddamned thing, scuffing their boots on the tens of thousands of pieces of real-world iron which the hundreds of mysterious drawings showed as ink-on-paper? Nobody, that's who. And yet, there I was, sitting in the trailer, smelling the faint aroma of ammonia that came off of the drawings, free as a bird to go through them as much as I might ever want to (which was a lot), trying to figure out what they were. What was in them. What it meant. How it worked. Oh hell, it was fucking christmas day every day, and I was a goddamned five year old. To this day I do not believe my good fortune to fall unexpectedly into such a place.
We never so much as suspected such a thing when I first showed up to be an answering machine, but I had the ability to look at those blueprints and see things.
Mistakes and inconsistencies, in particular. And I just started out by looking at the damn drawings when I wasn't doing anything (which, with the phone not ringing, was a lot of the time) and asking Dick Walls stuff like "Why is this here?" and he'd go to answer the question (He was a Good Man, hell, he was like a second father to me. I owe so very much of my whole life and what I've done over the years to him.), and in so doing would discover that I'd caught a mistake somehow. I never set out to make anybody look bad, I just wanted to know why. I'm curious (both definitions, by the way). I've been that way all my life. I'm still that way now, too.
And I would get all excited like a little kid, and say, "Look what I found! Look at this! Look at this!" and sure enough there would be two sets of "78B6 R/L" (or whatever) on the erection drawings instead of only one like the detail drawings showed, and Dick would groan twice, once because it meant that Sheffield had made a mistake somehow (hopefully nothing major, hopefully just a draftsman writing the wrong digit in the wrong place), and a second time because I was so damnfool happy about finding it. It meant that I was actually doing things, and the things I was doing had me stacked up against people who were building a goddamned launch pad, and these can never be low-skill/low-energy people, and the fact that I was finding things that they were not, was extraordinarily intoxicating, because it meant that I was working at least at that level, and perhaps even higher in certain instances, and never in all my life would I have imagined such a thing could ever be possible, and yes, it felt very good, and I've never been shy about expressing myself when I'm feeling good about something.
I simply cannot describe the exhilaration that came with making discoveries that people building a launch pad out on Cape Canaveral, had failed to catch. I guess it's going to have to be enough to just say that it felt really good.
Regardless of how Richard Walls may have groaned at the time, it was always better to find things like this in the field trailer, than it was to find out up on the tower with a crew of ironworkers and a crane brought to a dead, expensive, halt, while the issue got sorted out satisfactorily, so RW would continue to not only encourage me in my efforts (with admonishments to try and not be so damn pleased with myself for finding stuff), but would also flip new tasks at me and see how I did with them.
Turns out I did pretty damn good with all of it. The Fates had silently handed it over to me, at birth, unannounced, and up to this point, almost thirty years into life, I was completely unaware that they had done so. They had, for reasons that will never be known, bestowed upon me a multitude of hidden gifts, none of which I had ever been given the slightest clue about in all the previous days of my life. Deeply-hidden gifts. And this has caused me to now believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that everyone is possessed of their own, differing, deeply-hidden gifts which are silently waiting for the Hand of Fate to call upon them, to let their possessors in on the secret that they have been carrying around inside themselves, unknowingly, for a lifetime.
No, I do not know where it comes from. It's just inside of me somewhere, and it's there when I need it, and beyond that I do not have the faintest clue as to how any of it works, or why it would be the least trouble for anybody else to do it. Except that most people can't. Or won't. I do not know.
I think it all comes back down to interest. If you're interested, if you're really interested, then you'll pick it up pretty damn quick. So I work hard to guide my interest toward things that matter. Things that make a difference. The things that underpin the world around me. All of that why stuff hidden down there underneath the what stuff that lives up on top of it. I have almost no interest at all in games and entertainments and sports and magic and spooks and religion and who's sleeping with who and who's car is the shiniest and who's house is the biggest and who has the most money and all the rest of that awful goddamned crap. That stuff doesn't do anything except move people around in endless, pointless, useless circles on an imaginary social chessboard. It's all just for show. Bores me to tears. Give me something with a little substance to it. Please. Give me something I can sink my teeth into.
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