Strange Angel (16 page)

What the rocketeers didn't realize was that the corrosive fog they had unleashed had permeated most of the GALCIT building. When they reconvened the next day, having carefully avoided the irate gardeners congregated outside the chemistry building, they were met by GALCIT's furious janitorial staff. The caustic gas had left a layer of rust on virtually all the metal scientific equipment in the building. The rocketeers were forced to spend the rest of the day scrubbing it off with oily rags under the baleful stare of the faculty.

Kármán, hearing about his staff's antagonism towards the motley crew of researchers—some of whom, it was pointed out, were not even students of the institute—expelled them outside to a concrete platform attached to the corner of the building. Here they suspended their pendulum from beams that stuck out from the roof and built a small laboratory from sandbags and corrugated iron.

Having escaped explosions in the Arroyo and asphyxiation in the GALCIT building, the Rocket Research Group swiftly became known among the other students as the “Suicide Squad.” Parsons cherished the peculiar personal chemistry of the group and the informality with which it worked. It was a fluid, self-sufficient body, the members responsible only to themselves. Within the group the friendly friction between the trained scientific mind and the untrained imagination caused ideas to crack and sparkle. Experimental results led to theory, and theorizing led back to experiments. The group knew that trial and error was the only way to progress in rocketry. If members of the Suicide Squad wanted to walk away in a sulk, the others knew they would eventually return. After all, where else could they get to play with rockets all day?

By placing the Suicide Squad out in the open, Kármán might have saved his laboratory from destruction, but he also ensured that the rocketeers gained notoriety. Their continuing tests—some comical, some successful—attracted much attention on campus. Loud intermittent pops and blasts would emanate from their laboratory. “I remember we ran to the window when we heard one bang and [saw] one of the guys ... thrown out of the hut,” remembered aeronautics professor Hans Liepmann. “[They] were a strange bunch, a very strange bunch.” Between classes other students would crowd around the group to watch them prepare their experiments. They became such a campus sideshow that one of the Suicide Squad suggested a collection be taken from the gawking students to help finance their work. Many of the Caltech students hoped for a spectacular explosion, but the Suicide Squad were taking no chances. “About every part of our apparatus is a research problem in itself,” wrote Malina to his parents. “Everything is being made 5 or 6 times stronger than necessary. The $1000 fund is rapidly diminishing.”

The rocketeers were also achieving notoriety off campus. Newspaper reporters from the local Pasadena papers began writing articles on the group. Intrigued by the rocketeers' affiliation with Caltech,
Popular Mechanics
ran a photo of their experiments. Nevertheless, within the Caltech hierarchy they were still treated with caution and some amusement. At a GALCIT seminar Malina was asked to review a paper on the equally embryonic—but quite unrelated—technology of helicopters. “I seem to be becoming the department fantasy expert,” he lamented.

 

While the group was egalitarian to a fault, outsiders to the project often overlooked Parsons and Forman's involvement. The
California Tech,
Caltech's student newspaper, carried a front-page article on the rocket experiments that mentioned only graduate students Malina, Smith, and Tsien. Shortly afterward, a small article appeared in
Time
magazine, but once again it was only the Caltech students who were named. To both Parsons and Forman, their exclusion must have come as something of a blow, especially to Parsons who had longed for a university education. Although he had been denied a place at Stanford because of his precarious financial situation, Parsons had eventually been admitted to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles to take night courses in chemistry. He had been attending for just over a year, but his overwhelming workload at the powder companies and on the rocket project meant his presence was sporadic. Now, just when it seemed he was being admitted into the Caltech fold, he found himself still being kept at arm's length. But he was soon to find his skills acknowledged in a slightly more unexpected venue.

While Pasadena basked in its aura of refinement, a few miles away in Los Angeles, a story straight out of a hard-boiled Raymond Chandler novel was unraveling. Los Angeles had been hit hard by the depression. It suffered the highest bankruptcy rate in the country and unemployment was rife. By 1933, for all its Hollywood trappings of glamour, the city had become one of the most depressed in America. Locals went broke, impoverished transients arrived, the homeless slept on the street. Soup kitchens abounded, offering a bowl of brown rice and vegetable soup for a penny. With poverty came crime. Under the crooked smile of Mayor Frank Shaw, Los Angeles had been skillfully worked into a ferment of vice. Since Shaw had been elected in 1933, as a Roosevelt-idolizing Democrat, both panhandlers and corrupt executives had flourished. Prostitution prospered, gambling was endemic, and bribery was a way of life. The cops were on the take, and Police Chief James Davis openly boasted of his “shoot-first-ask-questions-later” policy. Even the district attorney was operating under a felony indictment. By 1937 an estimated six hundred brothels, three hundred gambling houses, eighteen hundred illegal bookies, and twenty three thousand prohibited slot machines were scattered across the city.

It was left for privately funded reform groups such as CIVIC (Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee), an organization founded by the reformist cafeteria owner, Clifford Clinton, to challenge this corruption. CIVIC looked into rumors of corruption in local government, most noticeably the appointment of Mayor Shaw's brother, Joe Shaw, as his “private secretary,” a cover for his real role as the chief fixer in City Hall. In 1937 Clinton filed a county grand jury report charging that the local government was hopelessly corrupt and identifying more than a thousand gambling and prostitution rackets allegedly under the protection of Shaw's administration. For this, Clinton faced a barrage of abuse from all those who had a finger in the Shaw pie, most noticeably the
Los Angeles Times,
which labeled Clinton, not Shaw, “Public Enemy No. 1.” (Shaw had personally engineered a vastly inflated sale of the paper's former property.)

In retaliation for his report, Clinton's house was bombed. His wife and children narrowly escaped with their lives. When the police were asked to investigate, they claimed that Clinton had engineered the explosion as a publicity stunt. His cafeterias were stink bombed, and were besieged by health regulation officials claiming unsanitary conditions. Hundreds of nuisance suits were filed against him from “patrons” claiming that they had been food poisoned. But it wasn't just Clinton who found himself under attack. On January 14, 1938, Harry Raymond, a former Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer now operating as a private detective for Clinton's CIVIC organization, pressed the starter button of his car and ignited a bomb placed underneath it. The car was destroyed, the garage lay in tatters, but somehow Raymond—despite bleeding from more than fifty head and body wounds—survived. Even this jaded city was shocked when evidence pointed to none other than Police Captain Earl Kynette, the head of police intelligence, as the culprit. Kynette was arrested along with two of his detectives and charged with attempted murder.

The trial began on April 12 and dominated news up and down the West Coast. The prosecution immediately asserted that Raymond's car bombing could lead all the way back to Mayor Shaw himself. Over the next three weeks, as witnesses were called, the special prosecutor started receiving bomb threats, and the police chemist had to be given an armed guard. Tension was running high by May 9, when the prosecution called on its youngest witness to date: John W. Parsons.

A vital piece of evidence was a stretch of fuse wire, the same as that used in the car bomb, found in Kynette's garage. Now the prosecutors had to show what kind of a bomb could be constructed using this fuse wire and whether that bomb could have been used in the Raymond bombing. When they approached Caltech, they were informed that if knowledge of explosives was needed, then the twenty-three-year-old Parsons was their best bet. That Parsons was held in such high regard by Caltech's officials, despite both his age and his loose links to the university, attests to his extraordinary knowledge of chemistry.

As he had progressed from blowing up the lavatories at the military academy to shooting off rockets, Parsons had learned how to control explosions, to temper their bite, and to recognize their character. To him an explosion was not a violent and meaningless release of energy but a dance of expansion, one that could be studied as one might study a symphony. He also knew which chemicals were hard to get, which could be stored safely, which were too powerful, which were not powerful enough. He read not just the mangled car and tattered wall but the exploded casing of the bomb itself, as clearly as a book. Indeed, it was the smallness of these fragments, collected at the blast site, which gave him his most important clue.

Having seen so many of his own rockets explode and having had to pick up the pieces afterwards, Parsons knew all too well what different fuels did to different casings. The bomb container in the Kynette case had been torn into tiny pieces. After making numerous tests he narrowed the possible explosive down to a high explosive, a nitrocellulose-based, smokeless powder similar to those he had helped create at the Halifax and Hercules powder companies. In fact, Parsons had even considered using it as a fuel for his own rockets.

Parsons built a bomb that he predicted closely resembled the one used in the Raymond car bombing. Then, accompanied by the court's special prosecutor, he blew up an old Chrysler with it. The results of the explosion, specifically the size of the bomb casing fragments, were almost identical to those found at the Raymond site. His evidence was good enough for the prosecution: He would stand witness.

His appearance in court was accompanied by a flurry of articles and pictures. He may have been one of a number of scientists called to the stand that day, but only he was young and charismatic. Most importantly from a newspapers' point of view, he blew things up.
EXPLOSIVES EXPERT MAKES BOMB REPLICA
, read the
Los Angeles Times;
CALTECH MAN TELLS OF BOMBS
, blared the
Pasadena Star-News.

Parsons brought a duplicate of the bomb to the stand. Six inches in length and three inches in diameter, it was made of cast iron water pipe; he had noticed that the original bomb's fragments had born the marks of “threads”—the grooves made for screwing pipes together. The duplicate was a persuasive piece of forensic science and a fair bit of courtroom theater. The “appearance of a very business-like looking bomb in the hands of a State's witness late yesterday caused turmoil at the trial” read the
Los Angeles Times.
The bomb was so realistic, Parsons' description of it so menacing, that the presiding judge was uncertain whether the replica contained explosives or not. He refused to allow the jury to touch it out of safety concerns. “It was a very colorful piece of evidence,” sniffed the
Times.
It was also an example of how persuasive and compelling Parsons could be.

Perhaps thinking that Parsons' youth could be a chink in the prosecution's armor, the Kynette defense team began a fierce cross-examination of him. If they could discredit the “young expert,” the prosecution would be severely hampered. But, again, Parsons performed well in the spotlight. He even gained a laugh out of the packed spectators with his unflustered delivery in the face of an increasingly frustrated defense. When Parsons was asked what the explosive velocity of trinitrotoluene was, the court stenographer was flummoxed by the spelling of the word. Parsons coolly suggested that its more common abbreviation, “TNT,” might make things easier. The gallery, having sat through hours of technical jargon, erupted in laughter.

Parsons left the stand with his head held high, his standing as an “expert” confirmed. On June 16, 1938, Kynette and his two assistants were convicted and sent to San Quentin. So damning was this case in the eyes of voting Angelenos that soon afterwards Shaw became the first big-city mayor in United States history to be thrown out of office by recall. For Parsons the case was a personal triumph. Not only did it highlight his prodigious chemical knowledge, but it also prompted his recognition as a bona fide member of the scientific community. The
California Tech
had failed to mention him in its article on rocket research, but during the Kynette trial he had appeared in the pages of all the major West Coast newspapers as not only a scientific expert, but a Caltech man.

Civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism.
These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a
properly organized society like ours, nobody has any
opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got
to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise.

 

—A
LDOUS
H
UXLEY,
Brave New World

 

Among stories of riots in the campus dormitories, reports on fraternity banquets, and the occasional mention of rocketry experiments, global events were rapidly filling the pages of the
California Tech.
FASCISM OR COMMUNISM, WHICH MOST TO FEAR?
ran a headline from 1937. It was a timely question: Events in Spain showed the two ideologies locked in direct opposition as General Franco's Fascist-backed forces battled the Second Spanish Republic, supported largely by anarchist and Communist groups.