West Coast Field Office

Perkin-Elmer had a group of approximately 100 employees who supported the Hexagon program. They were located at Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California. They were known as the WCFO (West Coast Field Office) team.

Here's a photo (courtesy of Tom O’Neill) of a lot of the WCFO crowd and a couple of customers folks. The photograph was taken in Murphy Park Sunnyvale California (1-24-2012) before the Gambit & Hexagon Celebration at Lockheed Martin. George Manolis took the photo and he is shown in a separate photo. The park was the site of many picnics-in-the-park during the HEXAGON haydays.

From Left to Right:

Al Thompson--Bill Fullerton--Pete Krump--Jim Florang-- Bob Zarba--Dominic Pascale--Dave Raspet--HB Tanner--Ed Woyshner and Tom O'Neill (kneeling). 

George Manolis

Also shown is a collage of the whole WCFO team but unfortunately too small to read the names. 

Big Bird

The first launch of the Hexagon spy satellite was on June 15, 1971. When the media found out about the launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California they called it Big Bird because it was so huge. It was the size of a school bus and weighed 30,000 pounds. 

Declassification Ceremony September 17, 2011

A group of Perkin-Elmer engineers who worked on the Hexagon  program standing in front of the Hexagon Development Model when the program was declassified by the NRO in Washington. It was a thrill for all of us to finally be able to tell our families and friends about our work and its importance to the United States. It was also thrilling to see the vehicle again after dozens of years since the program ended. 

Photo courtesy of Jon Aspinwall. 

Earth's Rotation

Paul Convertino who was the manager of the Optical Technology Division’s Systems Department in Danbury told me this story some years ago.

Back in the late 1960’s the Perkin-Elmer marketing people had an advertisement that was on television and it showed a space view of the earth and talked about all the good science that Perkin-Elmer was doing, but the earth was rotating in the wrong direction. Paul said “I remember a senior CIA manager that we were meeting with on an old program coming in to me and said “great aerospace guys you are, you don’t even know which way the earth is turning.”  One of our guys said, “You customer guys are so powerful why don’t you get to rotate the earth in the other direction.”

Tech Doc Dept 1982

The Technical Document Department at Perkin-Elmer in Danbury, Connecticut was an invaluable asset to all of our work. They created, copied, labeled most of our reports and official documents for all of our programs, classified or not. Their photographic section provided key photographs of our people, hardware, tests and models of interest. In addition to taking fine photographs and videos the department staff created artistic drawings of products. They were a major contributor to the success of a variety of products.     

Names of part of Tech Doc Department

Left to right:

Front row: Bob Ogden, Jean Walker, Lorraine Coffey, Mary Bresmon, Don Bossa, Ron Beck

Back row: Ray Haithwaite, John Restivo, Frank Tudino, Stan Karpacz, Pete Greene

Picture taken by Ralph Panagrosso

Oscar Berendsohn

by Phil Pressel

Oscar was my friend and colleague at Perkin-Elmer for 28 years. He was a very kind and giving man who was always ready and willing to give help and advice to all of us at PE. He was an expert metallurgist and materials process engineer. On two key programs at PE, the Hexagon spy satellite and the Hubble Space Telescope  he provided time and cost savings expertise that improved designs of critical assemblies. 

He was instrumental in solving many head scratching material problems during the design and operational phases of these and other programs. He taught us about special material coatings that helped protect against corrosion and he was the key to maintaining focus of the Hexagon camera over temperature changes by providing the exact proper heat treatment for a material most of us knew nothing about when we started work on the program. That material was Invar, a steel whose thermal expansion properties closely matched that of the glass mirrors.

He was also a good conversationalist and we often talked of many non-engineering topics, from both of our escapes from the Nazis to music and politics. I will miss him a lot. Phil Pressel.