This is an edited transcript of an oral history interview of Sherman Mullin conducted by Peter Westwick. This is the first of two interviews with Mullin. The first interview covers his career up to when he joined the Skunk Works in 1982. The second interview covers his career at the Skunk Works from 1982 through his retirement. Topics covered in the interview include: US Army as source of electronics training; demographics and racial attitudes within US Army in 1950s; electronics and computing in weapons systems of 1950s; transition from analog to digital computing; educational background of Lockheed managers; origins and importance of systems engineering; rise of electrical engineering in the aerospace industry; effects of L-1011 program on Lockheed; labor-management relations; Lockheed workforce demographics. Sherman Mullin was an electronics engineer at Lockheed from 1960 to 1994, program manager of the F-117 and F-22 aircraft, and director of the Skunk Works. Mullin was born October 12, 1935 in Somers, CT. His family moved to New Haven in 1946, and he graduated from Hamden High School in 1953. He enrolled at Princeton but left in April 1954 and enlisted in the Army, which put him through an electronics course for the Nike missile and then sent him to teach electronics at Fort Bliss from 1955 to 1957. Upon discharge from the Army in 1957 he returned to Princeton but left again in November 1957. He took a job at Burroughs teaching digital computing; then at Chrysler Missile Division in Huntsville from June 1958 to March 1959, as an instructor on Jupiter missile guidance systems; then at Stavid Engineering in Plainfield, NJ, working on the Regulus missile guidance system. After Lockheed purchased Stavid it sent Mullin in June 1960 to Lockheed Missiles and Space in Sunnyvale as a field engineer working on Polaris missile guidance. He returned to Lockheed Electronics in New Jersey as a senior electronics design engineer at age 26, working on anti-submarine warfare systems and, briefly, on business data processing. In April 1968 he transferred to Lockheed in Burbank to work on avionics on the P-3C aircraft, and then in 1970 on digital avionics integration and avionics test systems for the S-3A. In 1974 he returned to the P-3 program as chief engineer, and in 1976 became P-3 program manager. In 1982 Mullin joined the Skunk Works as F-117 program manager, and in 1985 he managed Lockheed’s successful entry for the Advanced Tactical Fighter, what became the F-22. He was general manager for the F-22 through 1990, when he became president of the Skunk Works, a job he held through his retirement in 1994. [Object file name], Aerospace Oral History Project, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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