The Impact of the Rich and Powerful

I have to say right up front that I never met the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes (that I know of), though he spent a fair amount of time in Southern California and Nevada and so have I. I did however get a private tour of his famous all wooden, largest fixed wing aircraft, the Spruce Goose. Not long after it was moved to Long Beach, my wife's aunt's boyfriend was a security guard at the property where the plane was being stored and he took us on a tour once. Inside the carcass of the plane I felt like Jonah in the belly of the whale. My brother-in-law jumped at a chance to sit in the pilot's seat where Howard sat. Somewhere, we have a picture of him sitting in front of the controls grinning like the Cheshire cat.

When I was growing up our next door neighbor and many other dads and moms in our neighborhood worked for Howard at Hughes Aircraft, one of the largest employers in the area, just up the hill from our school in Fullerton. One dad worked for YEARS developing a specialized communications radio that continually changed frequencies, making it impossible for wartime enemies (the Red menace in those days) to track broadcasts.

In a scene from the 2004 movie, The Aviator,  Leo DiCaprio as test-pilot Howard Hughes, crashes a plane into a bean field in Orange County.  I went to school in that bean field, but by the time I was there it was called Orange Coast College, and the bean fields were long gone by then. It may just be mere coincidence that OCC offers courses in Aviation Maintenance so you can still find airplane fuselages on campus even now. By the way, the propeller from that crash was salvaged and sits in a museum in the old courthouse in Santa Ana. I saw it last time I was there.

I don’t really know anything about Howard Hughes, though I remember the fuss over his will(s) when he finally died. The press at the time made his life seem sad, lonely and disturbed. I don’t know if it was or it wasn’t and this shouldn't be considered an homage of the man (though he may have been perfectly nice). Only that it seems odd that his life and mine might intersect in any way much less in so many superficial ways. I have heard, and pretty much believe that there are, at most, seven degrees of separation between us all. So, how many Howard Hughes stories do you have?

Tim Bulone is an ardent observer of life on the swirling blue marble. He works at Davis Group Consulting and creates fine art and canvas prints which he likes to sell from time to time at http://www.MyFamilyArt.com He is an early morning pedestrian in Belmont Shore, where he resides with his wife and a variety of pets.