by John Carter
At Aerojet Parsons mostly worked in solid fuels and was the Project Engineer in charge of the Solid Fuels Department, although he wasn't actually a degreed engineer. Forman supervised the mechanics’ shop and often went to the arroyo at GALCIT to perform static tests of his improved motors. Malina was working mostly with liquids at this time, which was his friend Summerfield's specialty. When he would visit the arroyo for tests, he would work out of his car.
Aerojet's first contract was for a solid JATO for the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, and their second was a liquid JATO for the Aircraft Laboratory at Wright Field that was used on the Douglas Havoc Attack Bomber. The original Aerojet offices were located on E. Colorado Ave. in Pasadena, but they soon moved to 285 W. Colorado Ave., the site of a former juice vendor. Test and production facilities moved to Azusa the following year, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. A picture of the groundbreaking appears in Haley's Rocketry and Space Exploration. The Defense Plan Corporation paid $149,000 to build the plant after some of von Kármán's friends in Washington got involved. Aerojet's third contract was with the Air Force, which committed $256,000 for solid-fuel JATOs.
The new work at Aerojet provided plenty of opportunity for evening and weekend work, and uncompensated overtime was a fact of life. The expanded group became rather close as a result; sack lunches were shared under a large oak tree. There was also a little tension. One time a mechanic cut off Malina's tie during a visit from Caltech by the latter, because he thought the tie was too formal.
One of the project's engineers from Aerojet, Walt Powell, had a glider he liked to fly, as it helped him relieve some of the stress. He did this so often that it became a distraction to the group, so Malina took it away and had it locked up. Powell chased Malina with an ax when he discovered what had happened.
GALCIT lost many young men to the draft. Project No. 1, however, the official rocket project at Caltech, had a top priority; thus, its men were exempt. The project in the arroyo rated further down the scale. Aerojet had the same problem, at the same time it was trying to expand to meet the new demand for its product. Hap Arnold himself had to intervene when Andrew Haley was drafted. Haley was back to Aerojet within a week, where he replaced von Kármán as the company's president, and worked hard, demanding that his employees work even harder. They often took pay cuts when he felt the company couldn't afford the payroll. Haley went on to become president of the International Aeronautical Federation. He traveled widely, and his book is full of pictures of himself with dignitaries like the Pope.
Newcomers to Aerojet were often shocked by the uneducated and inexperienced staff the company had to hire just to have some bodies around to do the work. A company photo taken when Aerojet was only one year old shows well over 100 people. Experienced engineers were not interested in rockets, so they had to rely on young inexperienced engineers fresh out of college. Von Kármán later said this arrangement worked out to their advantage, as they didn't have to untrain anybody. Amo Smith came back from Douglas Aircraft to work at Aerojet with his old classmates, and Fritz Zwicky also joined the company. Zwicky later designed the experimental “terrapulse” vehicle, which was intended for drilling deep into the earth toward its center. To my knowledge, it was never built.
Zwicky claimed that when Aerojet first was able to purchase some nitromethane, Parsons stole it and ran some of his own tests on it right there on Aerojet grounds. Zwicky also claimed that Parsons used to talk all sorts of occult doctrine with the Aerojet secretaries in order to get them into bed. Apparently, it worked, although Parsons was considered a handsome enough guy that he didn't need much “smooth talk.”
Unwilling to pass up any lead, Parsons was sent to New York in May of 1942 to observe the work of a man named Maynor, who had written Caltech to tell them about his own rocket project. A two-page handwritten note on file in the JPL archives written by Parsons to Malina from the Hotel Governor Clinton, New York City, on May 5, describes the situation. Maynor's liquid fuel rocket was unsatisfactory mechanically, to say the least, and his procedures were unsafe. Parsons told Malina that Maynor endangered himself and the spectators. Maynor claimed 1000 pounds of thrust had been generated, but Parsons found his measuring apparatus and recordkeeping procedures questionable. Maynor told Parsons that he held six “secret” patents. Nonetheless, there was nothing further worth investigating here. The second page of Parsons’ note includes a few hand-drawn sketches of Maynor's setup.
In a two-page letter to Frank Malina in May 1942, John Parsons describes the stunning indequacies of another rocket project he was sent to New York City to check out.
On August 30, 1942, Parsons and Mark M. Mills submitted “Progress Report on the Development of 200-lb.-Thrust Solid-Propellant Jet Units for the Bureau of Aeronautics, Navy Department, Progress Report No. 1-1.” Multiple 200-pound units were to be used together for a single take-off. Despite the fact that Parsons was at Aerojet at this time, this report is on file in the JPL archives. On October 16, 1942, Parsons and Mills submitted “The Development of an Asphalt-Base Solid Propellant, Report No. 1-15.” The photo of Parsons in a trench coat was taken around this time, on the occasion of a return to the arroyo from Aerojet for some tests. The photo may have been for the 200-pound units in the August report, or it may have been at the new Aerojet site in Azusa. (See photo section.)
After Parsons and Forman went to Aerojet, GALClT's next project was a rocket car. Malina and Summerfield had received a military contract to test the “Hydrobomb,” which was a euphemistically-named torpedo. In order to test the hydrodynamic properties of the Hydrobomb, the group constructed a 500-foot long “towing channel”—basically a long, shallow pit of water. The rocket car was built on a track above the pit, and the Hydrobomb was mounted on the underside of the rocket car, with liquid JATOs used to propel it 500 feet at 40 mph, a speed comparable to what it would experience underwater. Pressure gauges were mounted to the Hydrobomb to measure the effects of its motion through the water. Humorously, the track ended right at the project director's home.
The project had problems, however, caused by acoustic instabilities in the design of the JATOs. Acoustics was a yet-to-be-discovered field and thus was not recognized as the problem. The rocket car finally self-destructed in a huge blaze during one of the tests, and the project was abandoned. The dramatic demise of the rocket car was captured on color film. In 1942, author William A.H. White, who wrote science fiction as Anthony Boucher and mysteries as H.H. Holmes (the name of an infamous Chicago murderer), penned and had published a crossover murder mystery/science fiction novel about the rocket car called Rocket to the Morgue. It was written and published in 1942, and later reprinted under White's “Boucher” pseudonym. The novel clearly portrays John Parsons as one of the main characters. White later founded and edited The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as writing several stories and novels in both genres. He was popular science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's editor for years.
In Rocket to the Morgue, Parsons is the character Hugo Chantrelle, to whom White often simply refers as “the goatee.” Ed Forman is his assistant “Gribble,” and Robert Heinlein is “Austin Carter.” Science fiction writer and future founder of the Church of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard is “D. Vance Wimple,” while John W. Campbell is “Don Stewart,” and Jack Williamson is “Joe Henderson.” In the “Afterword” of the 1951 edition, White says that Heinlein's Mañana Literary Society “existed in fact precisely as it is depicted in this book…I've managed to capture a moment that has some interest as a historical footnote to popular culture. This is the way it was in Southern California just before the war, when science fiction was being given its present form.” Because of this assertion, we must pay close attention to the fact that Austin Carter (Heinlein) and Hugo Chantrelle (Parsons) spend a lot of time together in the book, including some meetings at the former's house. And it should also be noted that the book was written a few years before Parsons actually met L. Ron Hubbard.
White described Cha
ntrelle as:
[A]n eccentric scientist. In working hours at the California Institute of Technology he was an uninspired routine laboratory man; but on his own time he devoted himself to those peripheral aspects of science which the scientific purist damns as mumbo-jumbo, those new alchemies and astrologies out of which the race may in time construct unsurmised wonders of chemistry and astronomy.
The rocketry of Pendray, the time-dreams of Dunne, the extra sensory perception of Rhine, the sea serpents of Gould, all these held his interests far more than any research conducted by the Institute. He was inevitably a member of the Fortean Society of America, and had his own file of unbelievable incidents eventually to be published as a supplement to the works of Charles Fort. It must be added in his favor that his scientific training automatically preserved him from the errors of the Master [Fort]. His file was carefully authenticated, and often embellished with first-hand reports.
The entire book is worth reading for nothing else than the characterization of Parsons as Chantrelle. While it is obviously a literary portrayal rather than a biographical sketch, Rocket to the Morgue certainly depicts the author's impression of Parsons. White's statement about Parsons being a member of the Fortean Society, for instance, may not be factual, but certainly Parsons was interested in “Forteana,” the bizarre scientific anomalies found around the globe for millennia and chronicled by the indefatigable Fort.
White's reference to “the time-dreams of Dunne” was repeated elsewhere in the book and concerns J.W. Dunne's An Experiment With Time, an odd little volume first published in 1927. Dunne's hypothesis, which he supports with lengthy descriptions of his own dreams, is that dreams may often foretell future events. He goes to great lengths to support this with a philosophical discussion of the nature of time. Austin Carter (Heinlein) was also quite interested in Dunne's book, according to White's dramatization, in which Chantrelle spends much of the time describing his premonitions of the murder and other ominous events, brought on by his “Extra Sensory Perception,” which he repeats often, or his equally mystical “awareness of past phases of seriotemporal existence.”
Chantrelle mentions Starmaker author Olaf Stapleton as well as Fowler Foulkes as two science fiction writers who had impressed him, possibly favorites of Parsons’ as well.5 Chantrelle also says that “one of the greatest services science fiction can render to science” is to lead the public gradually into accepting implausible concepts as fantastic, evidently referring to Parsons’ public acceptance of his own rockets, if this was indeed a comment of his.
White's account of the rocket car is a bit garbled, but the incidental material he documents surrounding the science fiction writers in Southern California at the time is invaluable to any historian. Based on his description, it is clear he never visited GALCIT to witness a test of the rocket car, nor did he seem to understand exactly how it was configured. He does make it an interesting plot device, however: it is the murder weapon. Perhaps he heard of the rocket car project directly from Parsons, though Parsons’ involvement (if any) with the project was incidental, possibly exaggerated by him, or he may have been there in some less-than-official capacity. According to Alva Rogers, White/Boucher visited Parsons’ house frequently enough to get much of his material from Parsons himself.
It is appropriate that Parsons was fascinated by and involved in not only rocket science but also science fiction, since the latter is an inspiration for the former, providing ideas about where humanity and the future are headed that can be acted upon and brought to fruition. Science fiction and fantasy also bridge the two seemingly disparate worlds that Parsons occupied, i.e., the aerospace industry and the occult. The combination is not so strange, however, as numerous scientists, engineers, researchers and other professionals also have had spiritual and religious lives. What is surprising to the average person, however, is that Parsons was apparently so unorthodox and rebellious, but this “delightful screwball,” as von Kármán called Parsons, was never content with the conventional, ordinary and mundane. In both sides of his double life, he would always shoot for the moon.
* * *
4. The next year, GALCIT-61c replaced GALCIT-53 as the fuel of choice.
5. Cameron said that E.R. Eddison was Parsons’ favorite science fiction author. Parsons read Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros to her.
five
The Return to South Orange Grove Ave.: 1942–1945
On June 26, 1942, John and Helen Parsons moved from 168 S. Terrace Drive into the old Arthur Fleming mansion at 1003 S. Orange Grove Ave., just blocks from where he had grown up at 537 S. Orange Grove Ave. Fleming Mansion was an expensive and exclusive part of Pasadena, called, as noted, “Millionaire's Mile,” with palm trees lining the streets and flowering magnolias adorning the yards. There was also a smaller coach house on the grounds, at 1003½ S. Orange Grove Ave., where Wilfred Smith lived. Life in Pasadena in the early ‘40s is accurately portrayed in James Cain's novel Mildred Pierce, which was made into the film starring Joan Crawford.
According to writer Iris Chang, Parsons had a mannequin dressed in a tuxedo on his front porch, upon which he placed a sign saying, “The Resident.” Next to the mannequin was a bucket for the mailman to place all mail so addressed.
Built by its namesake out of redwood around the turn of the century, the house was modeled after the Norwegian homes of the time.6 There were 10 bedrooms on three floors in the main house, with several more bedrooms in the coach house behind it. A small domed portico supported by six concrete columns stood in the backyard. Parsons converted the estate buildings into approximately 19 apartments. The house was razed in the late 1940s to make room for an apartment complex.
Fleming, the original owner of the mansion, was a noted philan thropist and Nobel Prize winner who had made a good deal of money in the Canadian logging industry. He had donated over $5 million to Caltech alone and was the Chairman of its Board of Directors. He also owned what would become Yosemite after he sold the acreage to the government at half-price for the purpose of establishing a park, rather than selling out to commercial interests who were vying for the land.
Fleming had arrived in Pasadena decades earlier, soon after which his wife died. Fleming himself died on August 11, 1940, and the big old house stood vacant until an attorney named John M. Dean and his wife Dorothy bought the place in 1942. Parsons leased the house from Dean, and the Agape Lodge relocated to “the Parsonage,” as it came to be called. Dean does not show up on the membership rosters from that period, but he must have been privy and sympathetic to the lodge's activities, as he and his wife resided in the house along with Parsons and the others, according to the 1947 city directory.
Parsons’ bedroom upstairs, which was the largest room, doubled as a temple. There was the obligatory copy (handcrafted) of the Stele of Revealing, an Egyptian tablet that had inspired Crowley during his trip in 1904 to Cairo, where it was object number 666 in the Museum of Antiquities.7 Crowley's translation of the stele appears in Liber AL, a section of which, AL III:10, requires a copy for ritual purposes. The Parsonage also contained a beautiful library with wood paneling, a large signed portrait of Crowley, hundreds of books on occult matters, and the numerous letters exchanged between Crowley and Parsons. The living room contained an expensive, modern hi-fi system—Parsons loved to play classical music at very high volume.
Parsons lived next to the estate of the late Lilly Anheuser Busch, widow of brewer Adolphus Busch, and the house backed up onto the famous Busch Sunken Gardens, which were beautiful and huge, at least 34 acres in size, by early accounts. By Parsons’ time there were 11 acres left, which is still quite sizable for a well-maintained park in a residential area. One photo of Lilly shows her painting a landscape scene in the gardens, surrounded by concrete yard gnomes. Her estate was also the site of public Easter egg hunts for the city's children. The city briefly considered making the gardens into a park after her death, but the land was sold and subdivided in the late 1950s.
Parsons shocked his
conservative neighbors when he started renting out rooms to less-than-desirable tenants. The frequent visitors, noisy parties, and questionable goings-on raised many eyebrows. One visitor wrote that “two women in diaphanous gowns would dance around a pot of fire, surrounded by coffins topped with candles…all I could think at the time was that if those robes caught on fire the whole house would go up like a tinderbox.” He also said that an opera singer and several astrologers lived in the house. It is amusing to ponder the contrast to the previous owner's habits and what Lilly Busch and her friends thought about all this.
Fire insurance map of Parsons’ Pasadena residences.
One of the longtime residents of the Parsonage was Alva Rogers, who became associated with the house after attending several science fiction meetings there. During these meetings Rogers soon fell in love with a young artist who roomed there, and visited whenever he could, prior to moving in. In a 1962 fanzine article entitled “Darkhouse,” Rogers wrote:
In the ads placed in the local paper Jack specified that only bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists, anarchists, or other exotic types need apply for rooms—any mundane soul would be unceremoniously rejected. This ad, needless to say, caused quite a flap in Pasadena when it appeared…
There was a fine selection of hand-picked tenants, characters all. A few examples: The professional fortune teller and seer who always wore appropriate dresses and decorated her apartment with symbols and artifacts of arcane lore; a lady, well past middle-age but still strikingly beautiful, who claimed to have been at various times the mistress of half the famous men in France; a man who had been a renowned organist for most of the great movie palaces of the silent era.8
Jack's library (a large wood paneled room graced with a comfortable leather couch and a couple of leather chairs) was lined with books devoted almost exclusively to the occult, and to the published works of Aleister Crowley. Dominating the room was a large photo-portrait of Crowley affectionately inscribed to Jack. He also had a voluminous correspondence with Crowley in the library, some of which he showed me. I remember in particular one letter from Crowley which praised and encouraged him for the fine work he was doing in America, and also casually thanked him for his latest donation and intimated that more would be shortly needed. Jack admitted that he was one of Crowley's main sources of money in America.
