‘Too Much Gloom’ : Hughes Couples Face Twice the Fear, Anxiety

FULLERTON — Joan and Mike Hutson are part of the lore of Hughes Aircraft Co. in Fullerton. Mike established the first all-Hughes, co-ed softball league, the Maverick League, in 1980. In fact, the couple met that year when Mike recruited Joan for his team. A year later, they were married.

The Master Batters, as the team was called, was one of the original teams in the league, which played softball at the Beatty School in Buena Park once a week each summer for eight years.

“Everyone at Hughes knew The Master Batters because we had shirts and hats and everything,” said Mike, 55. Before long the softball nights at the Beatty School became a gathering spot for Hughes workers on their way home to stop by for a beer and a chat.

And then there are the “lifers,” such as Lisa McAfee, who not only met her current and former husbands at the defense giant, but whose father and brother also worked there.

“Literally, everything I have ever had was paid for by Hughes,” said McAfee, adding that her life has revolved around the place since her father moved the family to Placentia from New York in the ‘60s. For her first six years with the company, she worked alongside her father, who retired in 1986.

The 350-acre Fullerton plant has been like a modern-day company town, where everyone knows most everyone else and co-workers are often friends or family. Even though it has been downsized--to 6,800 workers from its high of about 15,000--there are still scores of people, like Joan and Mike Hutson and Lisa and Dave McAfee, who met at the defense manufacturing plant and later married.

Hughes officials last month announced plans to dismiss as many as 1,000 employees at the Orange County facility and transfer thousands of others to its plants in El Segundo, Long Beach, San Diego and Tucson, Ariz. Everyone working at Hughes faces difficult decisions in the coming weeks, but the idea of having a job relocated or eliminated weighs especially heavy on the married couples who have two careers and two incomes at risk.

Should both spouses accept transfers and move their families to El Segundo, if that option is available? Should they commute? What happens if one is sent to San Diego or Tucson and the other’s department is to remain in Fullerton? What is best for the kids?

Hughes spokesman Richard Dore said that the company cannot take individual families’ special circumstances into consideration when determining layoffs. The company is sympathetic to their plight, but the scope of the transfers is simply too large to consider everyone’s special situation. All transfers, he explained, will be made on the basis of merit.

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Defense downsizing has gone on for years, but many of Hughes’ married employees became dependent on their sizable double income though they knew that it might come to this one day.

Hughes afforded them the opportunity to achieve the American dream--a large home with a yard and a pool, nice cars, a stable environment in which to raise children, and some money in the bank.

Then there is the friendly workplace atmosphere fostered by company-sponsored softball leagues, a bicycle club, ski club and golf club, which led to numerous lifelong friendships.

For some, the link to Hughes stretches back to childhood. Joan Hutson’s history with Hughes goes back 33 years to when she was 10 and her father moved the family to California from Nebraska to take a job at Hughes.

Among her first memories of the company were visits to Simpson Park, on the north end of the rolling, mostly open Hughes campus. The park has been the site for many of the company’s social functions, such as a recent Employee Appreciation Night celebration. “I have been going to Simpson Park forever,” said Hutson, who these days takes her kids there for softball games and company picnics.

Hutson’s first job as a teen-ager was a summer stint at Hughes doing clerical work while she was still a student at Garden Grove High School. That summer she rode to work with her dad, who was an engineer, and her brother, who also had a Hughes summer job. Her brother also eventually became an engineer for Hughes.

Maria Henderson’s father also retired from Hughes, after 20 years as a business manager. “I really wanted to work here because my dad worked here,” said Henderson, explaining that a number of her co-workers wanted to retire with Hughes because either one or both of their parents did.

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In her 20 years working as a Hughes engineer, Henderson said, she has worked with her father, sister, brother, brother-in-law and her husband, Curtis, who said the plant closing has him worried about what the job turmoil will mean to his wife and the couple’s three children.

“She has never lived anywhere else and has never had another job, so she doesn’t know what to expect,” he said. “Even if we do go to El Segundo we will have to leave the kids at day care longer (because of an increased commute). That would actually be harder on them than it would be on us.”

Along with the emotional strain there would also be an added financial burden. The day care center in Anaheim used by the Hendersons charges extra for late pickups--$1 for each minute after 6 p.m. Traffic from El Segundo to Anaheim is likely to frequently keep them from arriving on time.

How the upcoming layoffs and transfers will affect the children is weighing heavily on the minds of nearly all Hughes couples.

“I don’t know whether to keep her here in her day care in Fullerton or look for a place in El Segundo,” said Allison Lengele of her 2-year-old daughter, Amber. “And what if she gets sick and I have to leave and drive all the way back to Fullerton?”

Lengele, a Hughes contract negotiator, is pregnant with a second child. She works on a Hughes program that is expected to move to El Segundo, but she says she won’t know for sure where she will end up until the company releases further information.

Allison and husband Michael, an electronics engineer, said they would move out of Orange County if they are transferred despite having bought a house in Fullerton, minutes away from Hughes, about a year ago.

The Lengeles rented a house in Fullerton for several months while they mulled over their collective future with Hughes. When they concluded they were going to make a commitment to stay with the company, they bought a 27-year-old, four-bedroom home about two miles from the plant and embarked on a whirlwind of home improvement.

They have since put in new wood floors, turned their fourth bedroom into a family room, added central air conditioning and heating, and landscaped the half-acre back yard that is home to their golden retriever, Aspen.

The couple said they believe they could sell the house for the price they paid, but Allison says they would never recoup all the money and hard work they have put into fixing it up.

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Dale and Gayle Carline are also recent home buyers but, unlike the Lengeles, they don’t want to sell. “We can’t sell this place without taking a bath,” Gayle, a software engineer said of the 14-year-old, four-bedroom house they purchased in May.

The Carlines, both software engineers, will most likely be transferred to El Segundo, but Gayle said that relocating the family is still out of the question. “I have always been in Orange County and I am not sure what is around El Segundo,” she said.

Because he loves his job, Dale wants to stay with Hughes despite a transfer, she said. There is also the reality that high-paying aerospace jobs are difficult to replace. “Try and get a $60,000 salary with a four-year college degree somewhere else,” she quipped. “It would be hard.”

Neither Joan nor Mike Hutson has a college degree, but each has moved up to positions of increasing responsibility at Hughes. She has gone from being a clerical worker to a job on the computer staff of the Peace Shield program. Mike has worked in several positions in the company’s program management office.

They are grateful for the opportunities to advance, and appreciate the attractive salary and benefits, but Mike said money is not the principal reason he and Joan have been with Hughes for a total of 42 years.

“It has been the people. I would stay there forever if I could,” he said. “It has been a family company, really.”

Likewise, Maria Henderson enjoys her work tremendously, but said that the company of her co-workers has been equally important in her decision to remain at Hughes for two decades.

“I have girlfriends here who have been my friends for 20 years. You work with people for so long that they become like your family and it is really hard wondering if some of them are going to be around much longer.”