This is an edited transcript of an oral history interview of Frank Bullock conducted by Volker Janssen. Frank Bullock was a long-time control systems engineer at Lockheed. He was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut on 25 August 1919 and raised in Devon, Connecticut. He was the second child of English immigrants Frank Bullock, a machinist, and Nellie Beatrice (Price) Bullock, a church organist. After graduating from Milford High School in 1937, he worked for a year in a grocery store and a gas station to save money for college. He took a year-long correspondence course in mechanics from Aero Industries Technical Institute of Los Angeles, California and at nineteen, moved to California and completed their six month onsite mechanics course. He was then hired at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, doing riveting and template layout work on the Model 12 and Hudson bomber. In August 1943 he was called to active duty in the United States Naval Reserve and went through flight training. After receiving his commission in May 1945 he did a tour as a flight instructor. In 1946 he moved to Connecticut for a drafting position at Sikorsky Aircraft, and after four months returned to California to work briefly again at Lockheed and then become an instructor at the Northrop Aeronautical Institute (NAI) in Hawthorne, where he remained for five years. In 1951 Bullock again joined Lockheed as a contract worker designing control systems, first for the Constellation and later for the Jetstar and P-3. Beginning in 1956, he worked in the Skunk Works on projects including a hydrogen powered aircraft that was eventually abandoned, the SR-71, and the U2-R control systems. He retired from Lockheed in 1980, after almost thirty years of service. Bullock died in Glendale on 11 June 2011 at the age of 91. [Object file name], Aerospace Oral History Project, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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