by Graham Rawle
“Twilight?” George was surprised; he had thought it was still mid afternoon.
As if in response to her cue the sun slipped quickly from the sky, like they were seeing it in a speeded-up film. Sinking below the horizon, it cast glowing pink and yellow streamers across the milky lilac-gray clouds. Soon, the sky was suffused with the burning tangerine and gold of sunset. The clouds darkened, like coals amongst the glowing embers of a welcoming fire, everything gradually cooling as the light began to fade.
They continued their stroll. When they came to a stretch of cobbled road, Kay paused.
“What’s the matter?” said George.
“I’m afraid these shoes weren’t designed for walking over cobbles.”
“You’ll be fine. They’re just painted on. Look.” To demonstrate, George ran the toe of his shoe across the surface of the canvas that had been stretched across the road. He carried on walking, but Kay remained at the curbside. After a moment he turned to see her there, apparently stranded.
“Will you carry me?” she said.
“Carry you? What, you mean like a piggyback or something?”
“No, darling not like a piggyback or something; I mean like a groom carries his new bride over the threshold.”
THIRTY-NINE
BY THE TIME they returned to the main road, it was officially dusk and a new lighting effect was in place. Old-fashioned street lamps had been installed, each throwing a soft pool of lambent light onto the road. A gas station boasted garlands of colored bulbs, and various illuminated advertising signs glowed warmly against the darkening skies.
Kay, for the time being at least, was back on her own two feet on the understanding that should they encounter some other obstacle or if she should twist her ankle, George would be there to carry her again—a proviso to which he readily agreed. In fact, he couldn’t wait for the opportunity to sweep her up in his arms again, now that he had proved himself so capable of it. There was really nothing to it. Kay was as light as cotton candy and felt so deliciously perfect in his arms that he felt he could carry her forever.
The traffic floated silently by—perhaps at a more relaxed pace than during the daytime, as though the vehicles themselves were now off duty and taking a leisurely promenade around the town to enjoy it for themselves. All were equipped with headlights and tail lights, some with winking turn signals. Buses oozed buttery soft light from within.
When a particularly splendid red and sky-blue two-tone taxi approached, George stepped forward and opened up the back door. Taking his prompt, Kay climbed inside and slid along the seat while the cab continued to trundle along. He jumped in beside her and off they went, traveling at a vehicle speed equivalent to an easy walking pace.
As they passed along the streets, vignettes of Resident life reflected the soul of a society rich with community spirit. A man carried a small boy aloft on his shoulders so that he might reach the overhanging branches of a tree to which a confectioner had attached clusters of pink marshmallows. An artist in smock and beret, having completed a picturesque oil painting of the sun setting over the little church on the hillside, was packing up for the day. The local fishmonger stepped outside his shop to admire the artist’s work; he was clearly taken with the painting. The artist, in a bold gesture of generosity, presented it to him as a gift. The fishmonger was overwhelmed. He thanked the painter profusely, pumping his hand in a hearty handshake. As an afterthought, he dashed back to his stall and grabbed a large and beautiful shining silver fish, which he then proffered to the artist. The artist accepted with reciprocal gratitude. More handshaking.
Sweethearts canoodled on park benches, oblivious to anything but each other. The more senior couples took a leisurely post prandial promenade along charming, tree-lined avenues. A mustachioed street-cleaner stepped aside to let George and Kay’s taxi pass. He shouldered his broom, military style, and saluted as they rolled gently by. Many Residents paused to watch the happy couple, as if witnessing a royal wedding parade; some gave a warmly respectful wave.
The line was growing outside the Orpheum theater.
“Where are all those people going?” said George.
“To see a movie, of course,” said Kay. “Jimmy installed a projector and a screen. Queenie’s idea. They have screenings every night.”
According to the marquee, tonight’s showing was Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever.
When their taxi finally arrived at the town square George and Kay disembarked.
The little Overland Diner had been festooned with quaint colored lights and garlands of flowers. It was a balmy summer evening and customers dined al fresco, chatting affably over candlelit food and beverages. A trio of middle-aged musicians—guitar, violin and accordion—had set themselves up in one corner of the garden and were playing a sweet rendition of “The Very Thought of You.” A tiny dance floor had been set aside between the tables where a few couples shuffled around to the music.
George held out his hand gallantly; Kay accepted and they headed directly for the dance floor. Once there, his arms enfolded her and she fell into the rhythms of his movements, swaying lightly to the music.
Someone had stepped up to the microphone. A rich, mellifluous female vocal, full of warmth and purity of tone, drifted across the diner. George and Kay turned, curious to know who was singing, and were surprised to see that it was Queenie. She was dressed in an elegant sage-green evening dress, her face a perfect painted picture, her hair done up in a sophisticated swirl and adorned with a diamond clip. More diamonds caressed her throat. Though her glamorous outfit and the quality of her performance were deserving of a large orchestra or dance band, here in the special moment the little trio’s charming interpretation seemed the perfect accompaniment. The melody soared, carried by her lovely voice. She was a natural. Discreetly, George and Kay exchanged wide-eyed glances. Who knew Queenie could sing?
Queenie was at full melodic tilt. She gently caressed the microphone, making love to it, as though whispering sweet nothings into the ear of her lover. Her eyes locked on a customer at a nearby table: Jimmy. He looked up at her adoringly, knowing that the words of the song were meant just for him. His hand rested lightly on the handle of the baby buggy parked next to his table, rocking it gently back and forth in time to the music.
Having decided to cut out of the party to spend a little time alone, Kay and George strolled arm in arm up the hill, away from the diner. The sound of Queenie’s lilting voice carried on the warm evening breeze. They paused to enjoy the tranquility of the moment, looking back at the little twinkling cluster of diner lights in the distance, seen now through the leafy lacework of greenery. Beyond it, Jimmy’s grazing sheep were just visible as fluffy white specks in the moonlit fields where Howard Farmer’s tractor continued to roll along.
Everything was more wonderful than either of them could ever have imagined. They both knew that they would never have cause to leave Overland again.
At the end of the street, a newsvendor stood at his kiosk. Various magazines hung from a string above his head, but his main line of trade was the stack of newspapers in front of him, which he was keen to promote.
“Overland News! Final!”
George and Kay sauntered over.
“Ah, good evening. Newspaper, sir? Overland News.”
George glanced down at the masthead, delighted to see that his idea for a local newspaper had come to fruition.
“Final edition.” The newsvendor urged them to take a copy; this might be their last chance.
George nodded. “Sure.”
Seeing a little tin of coins on the counter, George sorted through his pants pockets for change. The vendor raised a halting hand.
“On the house, Mr Godfrey. You’ve done so much for this community. We’re all so grateful just to be a part of it. You’ve given us a perfect home and we all get a tiny share of it. A little piece of heaven on earth, you might say.”
“A little piece of heaven on earth.” He mulled this over for a moment. “I guess it is at that. Tha
nks. That means a lot.”
George raised the newspaper and took in the front-page headline. Smiling, he offered it for Kay to read: Another beautiful day in Overland! And then, below it, a smaller subheading. What have we done to deserve it?
George tucked the newspaper under one arm, slipped the other around Kay’s waist and they strolled off together down Overland Main Street.
Music from the diner was channeled now through the town’s speakers so that everyone in Overland might find comfort in the honey-cake warmth of the refrain. It was the hauntingly beautiful “Stairway to the Stars”—Queenie’s lilting voice, full of optimism tinged with wistful longing, supported now by the big-band richness of a full orchestra. The melody’s determined three semitone steps climbed up to a heart-warming surge on the crest of the lyric before settling comfortably back to continue on its gently meandering descent. It was an anthem, brimming with cheery hope, inspiring the Residents down the hill to join together in chorus, their voices soaring high and clear into the night sky.
Basking in the song’s uplifting glow, George closed his eyes to savor every lovely moment of the melody, rapt by the romantic sway and swoon of the lyrics and their confident promise of eternal happiness.
A thousand feet above them, Colonel Wagner looked down from the cockpit of his Lockheed P-38, still unable to find what he was searching for.
AFTERWORD
IN THE WAKE of the Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7th 1941, the War Department ordered Lieutenant General John L. De Witt, head of Western Defense Command, to find a way to protect critical military installations along the Pacific Coast. No one knew where the enemy might strike next, but the vast unprotected, uncamouflaged aviation factories just a few miles inland were obvious targets for a Japanese assault. Among those considered most vulnerable were the Douglas Aircraft plant in Santa Monica, Boeing’s B-2 plant in Seattle and the Lockheed Aircraft factory in Burbank, California.
The Lockheed plant, with its subsidiary, Vega, and recently acquired air terminal, was one of the most strategic military facilities in the United States. In early 1942 Lockheed’s workforce (90,000 during peak production) was the largest of any US airframe manufacturer, occupying nearly 3.5 million square feet of floor space.
While the army quickly set up barricades to keep out all but company employees from factory areas, windows were painted, electric lights were blacked out or dimmed and the building of bomb shelters began. Key personnel who had gathered at the Lockheed site to plan their broader defense strategy placed an urgent call to Colonel John F. Ohmer, a pioneer in military camouflage, deception and misdirection techniques. Though the USAAF had originally rejected his ideas as too costly, Ohmer, an amateur magician and a photography hobbyist, was now given free rein and a limitless budget to protect the facilities from enemy air attack. His mission was simple: to make the entire Lockheed Aircraft plant disappear.
Using a technique he called “visual misinformation” he combined two-dimensionally painted canvas with foreshortened three-dimensional props to disguise the Lockheed plant as part of the California landscape. When photographed by air reconnaissance, he claimed, it would blend inconspicuously into its surroundings.
With a camouflage engineering battalion under his command Ohmer began recruiting set designers, construction engineers, large-scale scenic painters, carpenters, prop masters and landscape artists from nearby movie studios in Hollywood. Among those offering up their specialists for the camouflage workforce were Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Walt Disney Studios, 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Universal Pictures.
Hangars and factory buildings were blanketed with acres of chicken wire, netting and painted canvas, transforming them into what to an observer flying at an altitude of 5,000 feet was an innocuous Burbank suburb with residential streets and sidewalks. Hundreds of fake trees and shrubs crafted from wire armatures coated in tar and then dipped in spray-painted chicken feathers gave the area a leafy, three-dimensional appearance. It was an elaborate operation: some army observers remarked that it looked like a Hollywood studio back lot. Buildings of all shapes and sizes – houses, schools and public buildings – were fashioned from timber and canvas. Most of the trees and buildings were not very tall, but appeared normal when viewed as a two-dimensional aerial photograph due to the extremely shallow depth of field.
In case Japanese reconnaissance planes were secretly flying over Southern California, Ohmer’s team needed the ersatz neighborhood to show signs of life. Employees from the factory below would periodically emerge through hidden trap doors in the canopy to move the full-size inflated rubber automobiles around to suggest they were regularly being driven and re-parked. Workers hung laundry on clothes lines only to take it down again later the same day.
Though Hollywood and the Pentagon had at first seemed unlikely partners, the movie set designers’ expertise proved invaluable in creating the grand illusion. Accustomed to budget and schedule constraints, they worked quickly and efficiently, but more importantly they understood the principles of stagecraft, artifice and visual deception, using their own techniques to fabricate landscapes that would appear realistic from a specified viewpoint, whether from the front row of a movie theater or the bomb bay of a Mitsubishi Ki-21.
The recruits included leading visionaries in the motion picture industry. John S. Detlie, an Oscar-nominated production designer and architect, led the effort to camouflage the vast Boeing aircraft plant in Seattle. Detlie, who was married to movie star Veronica Lake, left MGM in 1942 to manage the Boeing project as a member of the Army Corps of Engineers. Under his direction, the entire twenty-six-acre Plant 2 was canopied with a suburban network of streets adorned with some 300 tar and feather trees, fifty-three homes, twenty-four garages, three greenhouses, a corner store and a gas station. Detlie’s bogus town was dubbed “Wonderland” by Boeing employees below.
Warner Brothers, whose movie set designers had been instrumental in hiding the nearby Douglas Aircraft plant in Santa Monica under nearly five million square feet of chicken wire, was forced to give its own sound stages the same camouflage treatment fearing they may be mistaken for aircraft hangars.
In all, some thirty-four air bases along the Pacific Coast were camouflaged, but the elaborate subterfuge was never put to the test; no enemy planes ever flew over and the feared air raids never came.
The disguise of California ceased to be critical when in June 1942 the US Navy dealt a decisive blow to the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway, during which all four of Japan’s large aircraft carriers were sunk and Japan’s capacity to replace them was crippled by devastating casualties. The threat of a serious attack against the West Coast diminished then gradually vanished.
The camouflage programs that had been so rigorously implemented during 1942 were mostly removed by 1944. Some remained in place, but were largely forgotten. In the final months of the Second World War, Boeing and Douglas staged film and publicity photo shoots in which women from the factories were photographed in faux leisurely pursuits – gardening, sunbathing and picnicking – to show off the mystery villages that had until then remained officially classified. Prior to this, photography of them at ground level had been a criminal offense. The secrecy over the project was now lifted, but even before the photographs were published, crews were moving in to tear the camouflage structures down. Designed not to be seen, it was as if by making the fake towns publicly visible, the magic that had enabled them to exist could no longer support them.
Lockheed finally closed the Burbank plant in 1992. After the area was razed, the lot stood vacant for almost a decade, its redevelopment stalled by environmental concerns. The vast triangular plot lay completely flattened and eerily empty, like a mirage that had vanished. On maps and aerial photographs it looked as though it had been purposely blanked out.
Lockheed Air Terminal was renamed Bob Hope Airport in 2003, and the plant itself has since been replaced by the Empire Shopping Center: 900,000 square feet o
f major tenants, specialty shops and restaurants. Apart from the occasional airplane motif on shopping-mall signage, visitors might never guess that one of the largest aircraft production facilities in the US once occupied the space.
One tangible yet ultimately useless clue to the past remains: winding along the lower slopes of the Verdugo Mountains is a road named Lockheed View Drive. It offers a vantage point from which, ironically, the Lockheed plant can no longer be seen, having once more been made to disappear into Burbank’s suburban landscape.
Graham Rawle, September 2017
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Enormous thanks to my wonderful editor Clara Farmer for her unique critical insight and unflagging support all the way through to this, the eleventh draft of Overland; to all the people at Chatto & Windus who have gone out of their way to make the book work; and to my agent Will Francis at Janklow & Nesbit for championing this project from the outset. My thanks also to David Pearson, Mark Duff, Mark Lewis, Mags Swift and Margaret Huber.
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