Rocket team made town take off
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- When a team of German rocket scientists came to America after World War II, Huntsville was a sleepy Southern town proud to be known as the watercress capital of the world.
By developing a propulsion system for the space program and helping to put a man on the moon, the area's economy was transformed from cotton to high technology.
"I never would have expected Huntsville to develop like it has," said aerodynamics expert Werner Dahm, who at 85 is the last member of the team still working for NASA. "Now it's an international city."
The team led by physicist Wernher von Braun would eventually become heroes to many in Huntsville because their work for the Army, and later the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, enabled the United States to beat Russia in the space race to the moon.
Spontaneous celebrations on the streets after successful Apollo launches had become a regularity. By the time NASA transferred von Braun to Washington in 1970, he was popular enough to be sent off to cheers, hoisted on the shoulders of city fathers.
But the German team's accomplishments -- from the Redstone missile's role during the Cold War to the Apollo flights -- were about more than missiles and rockets to the city's economy and residents, said Bob Ward, a former editor and space writer for The Huntsville Times.
The propulsion systems, groundbreaking electronics and materials they developed and which NASA and a host of government contractors later refined, spilled over into the city's private sector, creating jobs and wealth.
The city has grown from a little more than 16,000 in 1950 to more than 158,000 people today.
"It all sprang from them, a lot of it directly," Ward said. "Huntsville became a city of brainpower."
Driven by the technology industry, the city flourishes today with nearly 200 businesses at the 5,000-acre Cummings Research Park, one of the largest of its kind in the nation. About 22,000 people are employed at companies in the park.
The Army and Marshall center still generate about 50 percent of the city's wealth, said Huntsville-Madison Chamber of Commerce Chief Brian Hilson.
But added to that now are such companies as Teledyne Brown Engineering, which does electronics and electromechanical work, and SCI Systems Inc., a computer manufacturer whose founders came straight from agencies at Redstone Arsenal in 1961.
Mark Wright, a staff historian at Marshall Space Flight Center, said Huntsville's success stems in part from von Braun encouraging city leaders not to focus solely on the space program but to diversify into related industries.
It was von Braun who first urged the city to build a research park and a university. Today, the city has both Cummings and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
"He encouraged Huntsville not to put all of its eggs in one basket," he said. "I think von Braun was interested in promoting any science and technology."
But Huntsville was a small town, not unlike many others in Alabama, when Dahm and other members of the German team -- after building V-2 rockets for Hilter in World War II -- began arriving in Huntsville in 1950.
After their transfer from Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, where the team worked on rockets for the Army, life began to improve. At Fort Bliss, they were strictly sequestered without civilian identification at a pay rate of $6 per day.
In Huntsville, team members got permanent contracts, and some not in administrative roles were paid roughly the salary of American engineers, about $4,500 per year.
Team members were allowed to begin applying for citizenship and many bought or built homes and began to integrate into the community. But there was still some adjusting to do. Reaction from Huntsville residents, conscious of the war years, was mixed in the beginning.
Many members of the German team drank beer, which some residents of the Bible Belt town frowned upon, and they stood out with their heavily accented English.