Keith Tillotson
Echo Park (1941)
Keith - October 1941
So I got out of the Navy and I went to Los Angeles and got a job at Lockheed within about a week. I rented a little place down in Echo Park – a little lake down between Hollywood and Los Angeles. I was riding the streetcar out. This was right before Pearl Harbor.
Vicki came up to live with me when I rented in Echo Park. But she was married and she went back to her husband. Came back from work one day and she was gone, but she left a lot of her stuff there.
While I'm working at Lockheed I got into hydraulics – installing kits and so on, making tubes. P38s we were working on. They could make about 400 miles an hour – fast.
I remember I was out on a hill one rainy day, standing up underneath the ship and working on some stuff, when somebody said Pearl Harbor got bombed. I figured I might want to go back in the Navy, but I didn't think about it too hard right then. They said, "Well, you're working here – you don't have to." I was classified as 4A, instead of 1A. You're not likely to be called. Partly because of my age – I was about 25, but also because I was working on planes.