Page 125 - MY STORY

pleased with Sid B’s inability to maintain our anonymity.

My next move was to call Sid and have a little
face-to-face.

Scene 6 – One day after my phone discussion with
Howard Z
Sid B’s third visit – My desk at Douglas Aircraft Co.

I pointed out to Sid that it was bad enough he had violated
our confidence – I told him that his indiscretion probably
made it impossible for us to win a competitively bid

contract from Howard Z’s WPAFB organization worth
around $75,000 (good R&D money in 1961) for

generating an Electron Fractography Handbook.
Amazingly, Sid had no concept of how the USAF used
Request for Proposal’s (RFP’s) and written competitive
proposals to solicit R&D contracts for contractors. DoD

competitive procurement practices were completely
unknown to him. He wanted to know if the Electron

Fractography Handbook was being generated to help
people perform failure investigations like the AIG office
he worked for, and what we had just done to support him.