This an edited transcript of an oral history interview of Steven R. Smith conducted by Volker Janssen. Steven R. Smith was an engineer and general manager of the aircraft division at Northrop. Topics covered in the interview include: surfing in the 1930s; early digital computers; race relations in aerospace plants; union organizing efforts; foreign military sales; secrecy and classification; relations between design and manufacturing. Steven R. Smith was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1928. When he was nine months old his family moved to California and settled in Altadena. He attended Pasadena city schools and then went to Stanford for a year before enlisting in the Army in 1945. He served eighteen months in the Army and returned to Stanford for bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering. In 1952 he joined Northrop in Hawthorne as a propulsion engineer, working on aerodynamic heat transfer on supersonic aircraft, and then worked for three years at Garrett in preliminary design, working on air-conditioning units and gas turbines. He returned to Northrop in propulsion on the T-38, worked in Northrop's Washington office for a year in 1960, and then helped Northrop sell the T-38 to the German Air Force. He then became program manager on the F-5 and was involved with F-5 sales to Germany, Norway, South Vietnam, South Korea, and others, including three years living in Iran in the late 1970s, overseeing 400 American employees. He returned from Iran in 1978 to manage the Tacit Blue program at Northrop. He worked on the B-2 design and, after Northrop won the B-2 contract, he became vice president of engineering in Northrop's aircraft division and then, in 1988, general manager of the division. He retired in the early 1990s [Object file name], Aerospace Oral History Project, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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