This is an edited transcript of an oral history interview of Curt Zoller conducted by Volker Janssen. Curt Zoller was a guidance and control engineer at North American Aviation and Rockwell from 1951 to 1984. Curt Zoller was born October 1920 in Vienna. After the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 his family moved to Havana and then to New York in 1939. He took an electronics course at ITT and began working for an electronics company, and then entered the U.S. Army in 1943 as an engineer. He was discharged in December 1945 and attended NYU on the GI Bill, getting a degree in electrical engineering in 1950. He went to work for MELPAR in Virginia and then took a job at North American in Downey, working on guidance and control primarily on classified military projects, starting with the Navajo and Hound Dog missiles and later on the Navstar satellites for GPS. In 1947 he married Gertrude Zoller, who studied chemical engineering before raising their three children; Gertrude sat in on the interview and occasionally participated. He retired from North American Rockwell in 1984. Curt Zoller passed away on October 6, 2014, at the age of 93. [Object file name], Aerospace Oral History Project, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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