I was recruited to TRW from the University of Hawaii by John Otera of spacecraft integration and test (I&T). I also had job offers from General Dynamics and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but TRW offered the highest starting salary.
I flew to the mainland in early January 1980 and TRW put me up at Barnaby's Pen and Quill hotel on the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) and Rosecrans Ave. It took me over a month to find an apartment to share in Hermosa Beach, and TRW paid the entire hotel and resteraunt bill. I bought an old Buick station wagon from a TRW employee for two hundred dollars. I rented a room in Hermosa Beach. Andrea came and visited me for a few days and we had a good time together. I volunteered at the South Bay Free Clinic on Manhattan Beach Avenue for a few months in the clinical laboratory. I learned how to do urine tests including microscopic analysis and blood tests including drawing blood. In the springtime Andrea came to live with me and we moved to the lower rooms of a house on Palm Drive, just off the Strand in Hermosa Beach. Robert Wilson, a psychologist, owned the place and lived intermittently upstairs with his wife.
I proposed to Andrea that December and we were married June 13, 1981, in a ceremony in her parents' back yard by my step father, Prof. Rev. Mitsuo Aoki.
Email: Richard dot J dot Wagner at gmail dot com
This page created April 9, 2002.
Updated December 17, 2008.
Updated August 5, 2009.
Last updated September 2, 2010.