Donald Hickman: Oral History Interview with the Director of the Pershing Missile Project

ABOVE: Donald Hickman, left, presents a Pershing model to Brigadier General William E. Sweet Pershing Commander in Europe. VIEW Article 

The trade that President Reagan made was he’d take Pershing II’s out of Europe if they would decommission all the SS-20’s.  And that happened. So that was a big deal. I never realized at the time, I don’t think, how important Pershing II was to the nation. But I did have a lot of pressure because of getting the program done and getting it fielded on time.

Listen as Donald Hickman, Director of the Pershing Missile Project, describes his life and work at Martin Marietta in Orlando in this oral history interview, December 16, 2014.

LISTEN Part I (14:35)

My  name is Donald Hickman and I was born in Montgomery, Alabama…  I attended public school and I graduated from Sidney Lanier High School there, by the way that was the only high school in the town at that time. I think they got five or six more now. I joined the Navy in 1948 and served four years on the USS De Haven. I was discharged in 1952 and attended Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now known as Auburn University –  Go Tigers! – I got a BS in electrical engineering and a Master’s Degree in applied mathematics. I met my wife there and we got married while we were in college and she worked while I finished my schooling. After graduation I went to work at Convair, Fort Worth and went to work on the B-58 program which was our first supersonic bomber. After two years there I accepted a position at Martin Marietta as senior engineer on the La Crosse Program. And I worked on that program a little over a year, I guess, and I got a call from my boss and he said he wanted me to go on the Pershing Program and head up the reliability preflight certification testing group which had responsibility for testing pieces of the hardware before they were actually flown at the Cape. I stayed there in that job for a while and was finally given a job of heading up the Advanced Product Improvement Program for Pershing and the outgrowth of that was Pershing IA and Pershing II.

Missile tests for the Pershing Missile Advanced Development Program were conducted at White Sands, New Mexico.

And finally I got up the job of running Pershing II which I did for about 6 or 7 years.

The Pershing II Missile developed at Martin Marietta in Orlando and shot from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

After that I decided I had enough and I retired. It was a wonderful career and I enjoyed every minute of it, but I tell you the truth I never looked back after I left.

VIEW The Pershing Professional Certificate awarded to Donald A. Hickman.

VIEW “Pershing II: Why It Alarms Soviets”, The Washington Post, Wednesday, March 17, 1982.

VIEW “Pershing II: The U.S. Weapon Most Feared by the Russians?”, The Retired Officer, April 1983.

German graphic: Pershing in the Garden SS-20 on the Roof

VIEW Pershing II Succeeds Against Russian SS-20

[What were the years that you were involved in Pershing?] From the very start it was probably about from 1975 to the Advanced Development Program where we were trying to prove … the accuracy that we advertised the system would have. And we did do that. And soon after that we were awarded the development contract and I think that was in ’78 but these dates after 25 years, I don’t remember everything. And it was a very interesting program Pershing II was. It had great national interest, even international because it was a system that was put together primarily to offset the Russians SS-20.

Army Times, February 28, 1983. Political cartoon on the international situation regarding the Pershing II Missile.

VIEW Pershing Missile cartoon from MOSCOW NEWS Weekly, No. 10, 1983.

VIEW “The United States and the Soviet Union called a recess until Jan. 27 in negotiations on limitation of medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe…” United Press International, 12/1/1982. 

And the whole issue in the long run was to get the SS-20 out of their inventory. And the trade that President Reagan made was he’d take Pershing II’s out of Europe if they would decommission all the SS-20’s. 

VIEW

And that happened. So that was a big deal. I never realized at the time, I don’t think, how important Pershing II was to the nation. But I did have a lot of pressure because of getting the program done and getting it fielded on time.

VIEW Dana Summers lampoons Pershing II Missile Tests at Cape Canaveral in this Orlando Sentinel cartoon, July 27 1982.

VIEW Dunagin takes aim at the Pershing test flights at Cape Canaveral in this cartoon “Okay, try it again.” from The Orlando Sentinel, November 7, 1982, E-3.

VIEW Martin Marietta Pershing Program employee cartoon firing back at The Orlando Sentinel cartoons ridiculing Pershing II missile tests at Cape Canaveral, A-15, The Orlando Sentinel, November 22, 1982.

VIEW The Pershing Missile Two Stage Test shot at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

VIEW Martin Marietta Aerospace Orlando accepts the Pershing Missile ARS/SLA Hardware from the United States Army, 24 October 1975. Donald Hickman, is pictured in the center in a brown suit and striped tie.

VIEW Donald Hickman, seated to the right signing the Pershing II Missile Contract with the United States Government Represenative seated to his left. On the second row from left to right are Martin Marietta Orlando Aerospace staff: Ron Pia, George Rupp – Contracts, Bill Brockman – Finance Manager, Clarence Tidwell, and Nick Depasquale.

The people at Martin were some of the brightest people in the universe…

One of the interesting things about that was that while most development programs, particularly missiles that do a development program and then they have a period of time when they’re putting improvements in, and they do another little flight test program,

VIEW Army Secretary John O. Marsh described as ‘extremely successful’ the Pershing 2 Missile test flight launched from Cape Canaveral.

and then production. Week after the last R&D missile came off the line at Martin, the first production missile came off exactly like the first R&D missile. That saved about four or five years of development and millions and millions of dollars. No telling how much money was saved by doing it that way. It was very successful. It was quite a career. I’ll say this about the people at Martin, later Martin Marietta, while I was there. They were some of the brightest people in the universe. I had one guy that worked for me, I’ll say the organization, he was in the engineering division, and we were having a terrible time with the radar system and the radar correlator. You had to correlate a synthetic map with what the live radar looked like and that would tell you how far you were going to miss a target and you could make connections. It almost looked like something on a television station. We had a tactical system. This guy he was Dr. Weber. And he went home and he invented a new form of mathematics that let us put that correlation system on a single printed circuit card. Whereas before, we knew how to do it, but it was going to take a cabinet full of equipment and you couldn’t get it in the missile. So that was just typical of the kind of guys we had.

VIEW Radar area correlation – “Pershing II Flies to Ocean Target”, Martin Marietta Orlando Aerospace Edition News, March 31, 1983.

It’s funny at least I have a little perspective of working at a company like that. If you have, if you do good work, you end up with sponsors, sponsors in high places.

VIEW Donald Hickman and the U.S. Army Pershing II Reentry Vehicle built by Martin Marietta in Orlando.

And every time there’s a promotion your name gets on the board. You might not get them all, but eventually you’re going to move. And if you have two or three sponsors in a big company like Martin that know you and know your work, you’re going to make out okay. And I had some sponsors and I recognize that: Nick Depasquale, he was the vice president in charge of production; Charlie Pryor, both of these guys are gone now actually, he was a director that had all kinds of jobs and all those guys helped me.

Pershing Program Training from Chuck Pryor

One of my favorite stories about Chuck Pryor, [who] ran the Pershing Program before I took it over and I was his deputy and he never made a major decision on a program that he didn’t come to my office – didn’t call me down – he came to my office and said, “Don, what do you think about this? What do you think we ought to do?” And I’d tell him what I thought about it. And he’d say, “Damn, good idea. We’ll do it.” Or, he’d say, “Now wait a minute, let’s think about that a minute.” He knew what the right answer was. He was training me. I don’t think anybody ever got a year’s worth of training like I got from Chuck Pryor. So I’ll always hold him dear in my heart because the day he left and I moved into the corner office, there wasn’t anything that came up that I didn’t know how to handle. He had trained me to handle everything. That doesn’t happen a lot I can tell you, but it happened to me. The people on my team, Claude Fetro, was my contracts guy for a while. He’s since gone like most of us. But he was outstanding.

Engineering Representative to the Change Board

John Suffield, that was my chief engineer for a while. He gave me a tremendous boost. He told me one time before I ran the program he says, “Don, you’re a pretty good engineer, but you don’t know a darn thing about how they build stuff in this factory.” He said, “I’m going to assign you as the engineering representative to the change board and this is the outfit that meets and when you’re going to make a change determines how much it’s going to cost, how you’re going to do it, what the schedule is and all that stuff. And you’ve got representatives from every facet of the company in that meeting and you learn, in fact, how it really works. And. I guess, I’m one of the few guys that ever had the opportunity to work a full year on a change board like that and get all the training and know how you go buy a 10 cent screw it costs $45.00 to the government because all these things that get involved – inspection and packaging. It just goes on and on and on of changes that go into something like that.

VIEW The Pershing II Missile Guidance Section photographed on the production line at Martin Marietta Aerospace Orlando.

Wasn’t I Lucky to Come to Work at Martin…

Anyway, I’ve had a lot of people that helped me along there’s no doubt about it. Fact is, without those people I probably wouldn’t even be talking to you today. So you would say that it was a really good experience working there? It was wonderful! I just look back on my career and I say wasn’t I lucky to come to work at Martin in Orlando.

VIEW Donald Hickman speaking at a Martin Marietta event held at Orlando Marriott.

I had a great opportunity and I met great, great, great people. If I had stayed out in Texas, I’d a probably, I don’t know what would have happened to me. But it was a great experience being part of that and we had great bosses. I mean, you know, it was just a good company. It still is I expect.

Did Martin come to Texas to recruit you?

In those days we had a whole different ball game as far as jobs was concerned. When I graduated I had probably 14 job offers. Some of them, maybe I should have taken. There’s an outfit called Hazeltine Corporation that all they did was they researched and got patents on things in the television industry. And if you open any television set and they list the patents they all belong to the Hazeltine Corporation. And they wanted to hire me to be in that and I probably should have, but there were all kinds of offers. Of course, after you got working and went to somebody like I went to Corvair, you’re there two years – you’re still that new guy. You’re still wet behind the ears and most people at that period of time decide to go for another company and I did. I selected Martin because of the work going on there. I put in an application and they brought me in for an interview and they hired me.

You came to Orlando for the interview?

Yeah, they flew me in here. God, I flew in on this airplane and I looked down and I said, “Where do all the people live?” All I saw was lakes. It’s all lakes. Of course, you flew into Herndon in those days. All the lakes down there. Where in the world do all the people live? [So what was it like? Was the Martin plant built yet?] The main plant was built. They were out on Elwell Street in temporary quarters and they had just finished the body of the main plant.

Martin Orlando Engineering Facility on Elwell Street in 1957.

Didn’t have all the other stuff that’s there. Just the main plant. I went out there and looked around and saw what they were doing and they gave me an offer and I took it. And I’ve never regretted that.

Pine Hills

I came to Orlando and we checked into a Holiday Inn and my wife was bound and determined to get out of that Holiday Inn as fast as she could and we bought a house within, I guess, in two or three days out in Pine Hills. Pine Hills was a new development then and in the right price range. We were lucky we bought a house on the hill out there. They had the floods back then and Westside Manor got flooded out. I looked at a house and wanted to buy it. They wouldn’t let me move in and so I didn’t buy it. The guy who built my house he said, “Sure, you can move in.” And I moved in two days later and then he signed the papers and ultimately the house belonged to me. He was going to let me move in immediately. It was on a hill and we did not get flooded out. I was lucky. The Lord takes care of fools like me…

Martin Car Pool

But it’s very interesting, in an area in Pine Hills that I lived there were fine houses. There was a little cul de sac that had three guys living in it that worked at Martin and car pooled. And whoever’s week or day it was to drive, everybody walked to their house and got in the car to go to Martin. It was a big deal when I got to be a group engineer and got a reserve parking space, that was a big deal. So we didn’t have to park way out there in the hinterland we had a nice parking space up front.

Martin Marietta Orlando Aerospace, 1982.

I lived in Pine Hills about five years and then we bought a piece of property out on John’s Lake and built a home out there. We’ve been there now 51 years….

LISTEN Part II (12:53)

VIEW Colonel William J. Fiorontino, Burt Steason, Martin Employee of Recognition and Donald Hickman at Martin Marietta Aerospace Orlando. As part of the Employee Recognition Program, Donald Hickman invited the employee recognized each month to join he and his wife for dinner at a nice restaurant along with the employee’s spouse.
 
Social Activities

Well, I’ll tell you the truth the dominate place where people who worked at Martin lived was in Maitland, Dommerich Estates, I think, up there. A lot of people lived up there and they were very tied together socially. I lived way the heck out in West Orange County. Nobody out there worked at Martin but me. And so there was not much social activity. We never really got involved in the social activities of Martin like some people did. There were groups that got together all the time and did all kind of things. We were just never involved in any of that. We had lots of good friends in our church and so forth. I didn’t see a need for us to drive to Maitland to socialize. We did have one very good set of friends, a guy named George Greek. As a matter of fact, he just died a couple weeks ago. He and I went to Auburn together and I went to Convair Fort Worth and so did he. And about six months after I came to Martin so did he. Of course, he and his wife and me and my wife, they moved to Pine Hills, too, by the way, were very close. And eventually he moved to Big Bear Lake and I moved to John’s Lake which is probably 45 miles a part and we slowly but surely over a couple of years just drifted apart. I got new friends, he got new friends, that’s the way it worked. But we just never really did get plugged in with the social activities [at Martin]. We had a separate set of friends at church which I think was good for me.

Church Life and Service

We’re Presbyterian. I used to be Baptist, but, of course, if your wife was Presbyterian- she converted me. But we joined the Oakland Presbyterian Church and we’ve been members there for, well, I was a member before we moved out there, so over 50 years we’ve been a member of that church. And serving every capacity you could have as a layman in a church I’ve been two or three times. Very, very active. Still am. In fact, this morning we had our Men’s Prayer Breakfast and I’m the chief cook. And we have about, I think, there were 32 this morning at the Prayer Breakfast. And we serve a full breakfast: eggs, meat, potatoes, grits, coffee, juice, muffins, homemade biscuits and we ask for a $2.00 donation to cover the expenses, and we make money.

Edgewood Children’s Ranch

And we give, our little group gives, well this year, we gave $1500. to the Edgewood Children’s Ranch. That’s our charity. That’s what we do with our money. And we go out there in February of each year and have breakfast with the kids. And boy, that is an experience, I’ll tell you. We all look forward to that. They come from all – we got Baptists, we got Methodists, we got everything. And, for a while we had a Mormon. But he moved back to Salt Lake City. [So you have a broad demographic as far as men from different religious backgrounds?] Matter of fact, the Mormon guy asked me, could he come? And I says, “Who’s your Lord and Savior?” He said, “Jesus Christ.” I said, “You’re in.” Most of us are now retired. We meet at 7 o’clock and we have probably maybe three people who still have an 8’oclock job. So we try to get out of there maybe a quarter til eight in the morning. What we do is a big breakfast, that takes a little bit of time. We send cards out to people who are sick and we get a photograph of our group that we put in there and also sign the card. And we got a photograph in there that shows who the guys are and people seem to appreciate that. If people get sick, we got a “Get Well”, “Thinking of you”, and sorrow. We got three kinds of cards. It’s been going on a long time, but to get a group that big is not easy. It takes time. And we got guys that come in, we meet at 7:00 am, we got guys getting in there at 6:45 that sit around and drink coffee and socialize….

Martin Employees Serving as Leaders in Church and Civic Life

One time I looked at the top of our [Martin] organization, every single person on that organization was involved in their church, either teaching Sunday School… G.T. Willey was our head man at the company at that time and he was a lay minister. I guess, he just looked at everybody and said, “Hey, what are you doing for your church?” He probably evangelized his staff. But they were very involved in their church. And people at all levels were involved. I mean, one of the guys who was my procurement manager on Pershing, he ran a Scout Troop at one of the churches in Maitland. They had a waiting list to get in the Scout Troop. He was really involved in that. Almost everybody was involved in some civic activity. I know I was. They asked me to represent the town of Oakland on the hospital board. At that time it was West Orange Memorial. And I went and talked to my boss and asked him, I said, “It’s going to require a little bit of my time.” And they absolutely wanted us to be involved in that kind of thing, even encouraged us, the guys to join civic organizations like the Lion’s Club and gave them time off to go to meetings. I mean gave them time off, it was a lunch break usually instead of 45 minutes ran an hour and 15 minutes. But they wanted you to be involved in the community. And they were.

These people got involved in the community and that made a big difference…

[So it seems that Martin not only brought jobs and brought the best minds in the universe to Orlando, but they also brought value in terms of the civic and church contribution and stability of the community, would you agree with that?] Yes! Yes! I think that. There’s a guy here [Missionary Computer Fellowship] with us called, John Tracy, he’s a big time member of the First Presbyterian Church in Orlando and Bud Brockman, same thing.

VIEW John Tracy, Bob Smith, Lloyd Riffe, and Walter Trippe at Missionary Computer Fellowship

I mean if you look at the people that were involved, the elders in that church, I mean, a great many of them were from Martin Marietta. I think they [the Martin Company] brought a lot. Some of them being smart guys to start with. When you get smart guys in volunteer groups like that, that really makes a difference. I mean you can have some dumb guys and they’ll do dumb things.  But these guys were sharp. John Tracy he works out here. I’ll introduce you to him. He ended up in the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church as one of the guys on the committee that organized the annual meetings and decided what the agendas were going to be. Now that’s big stuff. And he’s not any more unique then another bunch of guys I could tell you about. But yeah, we brought a lot. Martin I think, not only brought jobs, and a lot of bright people, but they brought – these people got involved in the community and that made a big difference.

Economic and Political Cycles

[How many years did you work at Martin?] I think 32 or 31. It was over 30, but it wasn’t much over 30. [So you transitioned through the political climates with our country and also through different economic cycles as well. As we know, sometimes companies come into an area and they don’t always stay. Martin has stayed. Do you remember some of those different cycles?]

VIEW Bob Whalen, Vice President and General Manager of the Orlando Division of Martin Marietta, acclaiming the signed copy of the Pershing II Missile contract for Martin Marietta.

Oh yeah, do I ever. I spent most of my career, I guess, I was at Martin about 33 years. I think about it a little longer and when I first came, shortly thereafter, we had 12,000 people working out there.

VIEW Martin Marietta Gets $414 Million for PII Production...This addition for the second-year production option, brings total funding on this contract to $606 million, making it the largest single contract in the history of Martin Marietta’s Orlando Aerospace operation.

At one time I spent a very short period of time, and hated every minute of it, working at the, not in the program side, but in the administrative side. They were on the functional side. We had the guys on the functional side: they hired the engineers, they kept their records, they kept their pay raises, they did all that stuff. Then they had the program side: the guys that worked on the programs that made them work. And I was always a program guy, but I went into the functional side I guess for about six months. And we had one of the downturns you’re talking about and I had to lay off good friends. That was a hard, hard, hard time in my life. And I decided this is not for me. So I wiggled myself back into the side doing the programs and that’s where I stayed. But we went up and down. I think at that time we got down to 3,000 people. From 12,000 to 3,000 is a big drop and this was over some period of time.

LISTEN Part III (14:35)

Leading the Pershing II Program

But you’re always worrying about making sure your programs got funded. My main job on Pershing II when I was a leader of the program, my main job was keeping it sold. That was the main job I had.

Photo caption: Another success Pershing 2 Missile Roars Off Its Mobile Station at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Sunday, blazing a trail in the eighth test flight of the controversial weapon. VIEW “Another Success”, TODAY, Monday, March 11, 1983. 

Making sure it worked was also a job. I got called into my boss one time to a big staff meeting and he was carrying on about something that happened on my floor about a screw is supposed to have three threads showing and how it only had one and there was a defect, tagged on it “delay” and he was on my case about it and the meeting got over and I said, “Hey, I’d like to see you, talk to you for a few minutes.” I says, “Now let me tell you something. I could go down to the factory floor and count threads if you want me to. I can do that. Or I can keep this two billion dollar program sold. Now which one do you want me to do? I can’t do both.” He never talked to me about threads anymore.

“Longer Range More Accurate Pershing II Moves Toward Deployment”, Martin Marietta Today, #2 1983, cover.

Does anybody know General Fulweider?

But keeping the program sold was a real, I mean you had to work on that. Because there were always people trying to cut the funds out. I read in the paper everyday about going to cut the defense fund, going to cut that. And every time you do that, you take a company like Lockheed Martin now, you cut a big program that’s people getting a paycheck. That effects not only them but the community. So the guys that run the program they have a real job to keep – I got tons of stories. I’ll tell you another one. My sales manager, his wife, and me and my wife, had been invited to a change of command ceremony at the German Air Force who had our weapons system in Germany with them. And they invited us to come to the change of command ceremony. And we had the tickets, we had the money, we had everything ready to go. And I went to Washington, and our program had taken all the funds out of the Pershing II program for the next year. And we were in Washington, the next day we were supposed to leave and they said, “Does anybody know General Fulweider?” He was the NATO guy in charge of all nuclear weapons. And I said, “Yes, I know him. I know him well.” They said, “Well, you got to go to Brussels tomorrow and talk to him and see what he can do to help make sure that USA’s government receives communication from NATO how important Pershing II is to them.” I said, “If you guys think I can just call my wife and cancel my trip with her to Europe, which will be kind of like a nice vacation, to tell her that I can’t go with her that’s cancelled and I’ve got to go to Brussels.” I said, “You guys are crazy. It’s not going to happen.” They said, “Well, what if you take her with you?” I said, “I might be able to persuade her.” So I called her up and I said, “Hey, I got to go to Brussels tomorrow. Do you want to go with me?” And she started, yam, yam…I said, “Hey, it’s ‘yes’ or ‘no’. We don’t have time to talk.” She said, “Okay, I’ll go with you.” So I took her to Brussels and then we went to Paris for a few days.

Pershing was different than any other program that you’ll ever know about…

Anyways, things like that happened all the time. You had to keep the program sold. Not only for your livelihood, but for hundreds of other people. So it was important and that was a real job you had to do. You know how you do that? Your customer has to love you. And I’ll show you something here. I got a picture here.

VIEW  Colonel Quill in charge of Pershing Missile training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, General Boyle, Commander of the 56th Brigade, Donald Hickman, Pershing Program Manager for Martin Marietta Orlando, and Colonel William J. Fiorentino, Army Program Manager based in Huntsville, Alabama.

Pershing was different than any other program that you’ll ever know about. We had four people that were really involved in a program: the guy, that’s me, that ran the program for Martin Marietta; General Tarantino, who is the guy from Huntsville who is the project manager for the government; then you had General Boyle, who was, he is a two star general, that ran the Fielding Program in Germany, he was in charge of all the operational systems, he was the guy, and this guy, he was the guy in charge of Pershing in Fort Sill.

VIEW Pershing Missiles in the Field at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 1983.

So there were four guys that were really involved in the Pershing Program. These guys got to be good friends. I mean they’d come over I’d have them all out to dinner. We met at least every six months we got together and talked about Pershing. When General Boyle had a problem he might talk to Farantino, but he’s more likely to talk to me. And say, “Hey, Don, I got this problem. Can you fix that?” And I said, “Sure, I can.” And I’d talk to Farantino and his deputy who was a guy named Clarence Tidwell who I got to be very, very good friends with. And you keep the program sold by guys trusting each other. I’ve often said, “When Clarence Tidwell and I got together working on something sometimes we’d work and the Army would win. But you know who always won? Pershing. No matter what – Pershing won. 

VIEW Donald Hickman is seated to the right signing the Pershing II Missile Contract with the United States Government for the Martin Marietta Pershing II Missile. Clarence Tidwell is standing directly behind Mr. Hickman in the photo. Colonel William J. Fiorentino, Army Program Manager based in Huntsville, Alabama is standing directly behind the United States Government Representative sent to sign the contract.

Every time no matter who suffered – Pershing always won. You got that attitude between your customer – you got half the battle won. Because so many times there’s a fight between the project office and the contractor. I saw it all the time at Martin, too. But the real secret is you’ve got to have a good product. This is no flimflam. It goes so much smoother if the people who are involved trust each other and they want to work together. One guy’s got a problem the other guy’s helping him solve it. Enough of that.

Pershing was fully funded…

[So that was the secret to the Pershing Program? Because I read that it was one of the most successful programs in military history.] Well, probably was when you get right down to it. But you know, let me say, I don’t want to give Martin too much credit on this. But so many programs are underfunded. I saw when I worked at Martin really good guys would invent a program. It’d turn out the cost was running twice what they bid. And so they fired this guy and hired this guy. Put another guy in there and he’d struggle and he can’t make anything. It’s terrible. Pershing was fully funded.

VIEW Committee recommends fully funding the budget request of $111,301,000. for the continuation of Pershing II RDT&E….

We had the money to do everything and we had to do it right. I attended the project manager school that the government runs at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, part of my training. And the guy got up to make a speech and he said, “Now what you got to do, you got to make sure your spares and your handbooks are available when you field.” And I got up and said, “Does anybody ever field a system without handbooks and spares?” I’m industry. All the rest of the guys are military guys going to school. He says, “Well, what program are you on?” I said, “I’m on the Pershing program.” He said, “Well, ya’ll are different.” That was the comment. Because we were fully funded to get the handbooks done, to get the spares , training done, get everything done, so the system worked and Pershing II fell in that category.

The programs have to be funded…

So I’m not going to beat my chest that it’s the greatest program in the world. We had all kinds of problems with it.

VIEW  Colonel William J. Fiorontino explains the events that led to the malfunction of the Pershing II Missile launch on July 22, 1982.

VIEW Pershing II Failure

But we had the money to fix them and meet the schedules. A lot of programs don’t have that. I think it’s important that people know that, too, by the way. [Because that effects the future of programs in national defense doesn’t it?] Sure, sure. If you don’t fully fund them they’re a disaster.

VIEW Pershing II on hit list

 You’re ultimately going to pay the price anyway and what happens is quite often, just for example, what if we had slipped the Pershing program for two years. You’d have 1,000 people on the payroll for two years that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Get the money and get the job done and get them doing something else productive. I’m on a soapbox now. I’ll get off my soapbox. [Well, this is insight which is valuable and it is an inside view maybe we don’t always get in the newspaper.] Never. [So there’s economic, but if I’m understanding it also effects the program itself and the quality of the product because even if you have the best minds in the universe if you don’t have the funding you’re not going to be able to accomplish the program.] -You’re exactly right. The programs have to be funded. It’d be better to do fewer programs and fund them fully than it would be to have a lot of programs and have each one struggling and delayed and eat up more funds because they get delayed. It’s not smart. It is absolutely dumb to take a program and try to save some money this year and extend the time deployment. That just costs you more money….

The progress made in electrons…

[Do you still kind of keep up with things a little bit when you read about the different programs?] Not much. I’m interested in technology a little bit and the things we were doing in those days were really I thought were good stuff. The stuff they’re doing now would blow your mind. I mean I can’t even imagine what kind of things they’re doing now. I recently saw a series on television that had to do with the Apollo program which is now 20 or 30 years ago and I was amazed at what they were able to do in those days particularly in orbital mechanics. How they took that Moon Lander, okay I can understand how they got that down there, but they had that thing fixed so that it was another little rocket ship there that took it back to the mother ship to be able to come back. How did they do that that long ago and look at the progress they’ve made since then. I mean the progress made in electrons… When I first went to Martin we had an IBM 360 that had a whole wing of the building in these big blue cabinets. Now you got a Smartphone that is smarter than that computer was. So you know things have gotten really – that’s things you know about. And the things you don’t know about is just out of sight….

LISTEN Part IV (10:27)

Missionary Computer Fellowship

It probably was through Walter Trippe, You’ve interviewed Walt? Well he was on the functional side at Martin and I was on the product side. And so he furnished all the guys that did the work came through Walt. So he and I got to be business friends while we worked. And I ran into him one day and he said, “Hey, why don’t you come down there.” [Missionary Computer Fellowship] So I came down there and I said, “This seems like something I would like to do.” So I started coming I guess 12 or 13 or 14 years ago. I come one day a week, just on Tuesday. And when we get through here I’ll give you a tour and show you what we do. But it’s been fun. I’ve learned an awful lot about particularly desktop computers. Because they come in all kinds of forms. They don’t work and you got to make them work and find out what’s wrong. It’s been a good experience. I’ve enjoyed it. I really have.

[And this is a nonprofit, the computers go to all different parts of the world?] You know it’s funny this operation has changed in the time I’ve been here. When I first came we were working primarily with missionaries primarily in Africa and South America. And we had a setup in the basement of the First Presbyterian Church. Big space. And we had a room in there set up in there kind of like a classroom. And the missionaries would come in and they would stay with people that worked with the fellowship. I mean they fed them, and kept them in their home. I mean sometimes for at least a week. Sometimes somebody’d come and stay a month. And they come in and they learn how to use the computers, all, everything. And the computers they worked with they’d take them when they’d leave. Well, that was the first phase. The second phase, a little more exciting for me is that when they went back to the field all of a sudden they saw schools didn’t have computers in them. And so they said, “Hey can you send us 30 systems or 20 systems to go into a school?” And we says, “Yes, we can do that.” And one time we sent 1,024 computers in one week to Africa. That’s computer systems now not just the pieces. That means the software, the whole thing. 1,024 to Africa in one week. Now we’d been building all those for quite a while. But we shipped them in one week. That was the biggest order we ever had.

Computer Recycling

But they went through that phase and then all of a sudden the computers got cheaper and cheaper. And so a lot of schools started buying new stuff not old stuff like we were giving them. And then we went into another phase which we’re kind of in now and that is to provide local schools like I’ve gotten computers for our preschool out at Oakland Presbyterian Church. They got four classrooms. Well, they got four of our computers in their classrooms and I’ve upgraded them once since I first gave them to them. That’s the phase we’ve been in for quite a while, most of it’s local now. We don’t get quite as much. Occasionally we get something from one of the missionaries, but not like we did in the beginning. I mean for about five or six years they just covered us up with requests. And you got the bulletin board out there you can see all the pictures of the missionaries that came through here. It’s a little different now, but we still provide a service and I don’t know how long that’s going to continue because the stuff is getting so cheap. People don’t need worked on stuff. One of the real services we’re providing now is, I take anything. If someone wants to give me a printer, I’ll take it. We don’t want any printers. I just make sure they’re recycled. So we’re doing a little service there on the side, taking these big monitors. What do we do with them? We take them and we got a guy that comes and picks them up and recycles them. So that’s kind of a sideline that we’re doing now. Now the real good computers like the one sitting there we’ll keep and refurbish and those go to – what does that say? “Hope.” There’s six of them going to them. But we do a lot of that. But it’s still a mission whether it’s a foreign mission or a local mission. It’s still a missionary type thing….

You know for the, like I take care of our church and, uh, once you get known, I’m kind of known in the West Orange County as a guy that will take stuff. And I get calls from a doctor. He’s got six computers he’d like to get rid of. Now what does he do with six computers? He gives them to us and we wipe the hard drives and give them to other people with software on them. Sometimes we get a computer, I got one in my truck now a guy gave me. I’m a member of West Orange County Club and he brought it out to the country club to give it to me. And I look at it and I know right away that computer is no good to anybody. When you look where you plug the keyboard in it’s a big round connector like that.  And once you find out that they haven’t made those in 25 years, so I know that’s got to be just a nothing computer. Did I take it?  Sure I did. It’ll be recycled. And I’m known out in that part of the world that I’ll take the hardware so I get calls from people who got them and I’ll bring them down here and if they’re good we refurbish them and do something with them. No good? Then we make sure we recycle…

Family Life

Well, I got two kids. Both of them over 50 years old so they’re not at home. So we got an empty nest. Both of them live locally in the Winter Garden area and planning big deals for Christmas Eve with all of us at church and then over to the house and open presents and all that. It’s a fun time Christmas is for us….

Interview: Donald Hickman

Interviewer: Jane Tracy

Date: December 16, 2014

Place:  Missionary Computer Fellowship in downtown Orlando

The Donald Hickman Pershing Missile Project Archives, a collection of international articles, photos, military analysis, and technical brochures on the Pershing Missile collected by Donald Hickman, Director of the Pershing Missile Project.

VIEW:

Part I Orlando Sentinel interview with Donald Hickman, Army Headquarters News, photos

Part II ARS/SLA Pershing Hardware Acceptance Ceremony Agenda and Photos.

Part III “The Pershing II: A Local Commodity,” The Orlando Sentinel, August 21, 1983.

Part IV Photos of the signing of the Pershing II Missile contract at Martin Marietta Orlando.

Part V Photos of missile testing at White Sands, NM and European news articles.

Part VI Martin Marietta Today Number Two, 1983: “Longer Range More Accurate Pershing II Moves Toward Deployment”, photos.

Part VII Articles and news bulletins on the missile arms talks in Geneva.

Part VIII Department of the Air Force: NATO’S Nuclear Dilemma, 26 January 1983.

Part IX Field Artillery Journal: Pershing II, May– June 1980.

Part X News bulletins and reports on Pershing missile testing and deployment.

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