Townsend and Floyd Odlum: Their Last Hurrah

Long-time Townsend Brown inquirer Jan Lundquist – aka 'Rose' in The Before Times – has her own substantial archive to share with readers and visitors to this site. This forum is dedicated to the wealth of material she has compiled: her research, her findings, and her speculations.
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Jan Lundquist
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Townsend and Floyd Odlum: Their Last Hurrah

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The evolution of their relationship, from the time Townsend came to Odlum's attention until the final collapse of Guidance Technology is documented in Odlum's papers in the Eisenhower Presidential Library.

Odlum, thought to be fabulously wealthy had been supporting two wastetrel sons for years. He insisted on pouring money into losing investments (RKO, uranium mines, and and a small airline). Pilot/wife, Jackie Cothren the first woman to break the sound barrier, had Odlum's backing for her every whim. Guidance Technology seems to have been another disaster of an investment. Ultimately, the Indio ranch where the two men met had to be sold to pay off bank debt.

David Clarke is in the process of writing a definitive biography of Floyd Odlum. His narrative of Townsend Brown's situation at that time is that Townsend was a mad scientist type, living as a recluse near the Salton Sea.

Pg. 27, Biography of Floyd Odlum. https://www.scribd.com/document/3843289 ... is-First#

What we Brown hounds know, via Linda, is that while at Decker, Townsend received a call to tell him that British spy, George Blake. had escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison and fled to the Soviet Union. Blake had been part of the Secret Intelligence Service, before becoming a double agent. Fearing that Blake had taken personally dangerous knowledge with him, Brown left Philadelphia immediately and took to ground in the most unlikely of places, a then-thriving resort community on an accidental salt lake in a remote desert.

As the story goes, once Edward Teller looked at The Fan and said he did not understand it, Odlum had the encouragement he needed to fund Townsend's work at Guidance Technology. However, after Townsend gave his talk at Rand and left The Fan behind, Guidance Tech faded away.

This joint collaboration in this venture seems to represent the last hurrah for both men. Oldum's hopes for a big strike would be dashed.

And,from this point on, Townsend's record becomes fragmented. He seems to bounce from the Stanford area to Catalina and back. SiL George has fleshed out some of Brown's activities at Stanford, in Atherton, and aboard a submarine in the Catalina Harbor. Linda recalls that she once wrote a check for $100,000, from the Brown Foundation to Stanford U. but so far, there seems to be no narrative thread connecting any of these with Townsend's public ventures in Catalina. (A fogless shaving mirror?)
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Re: Townsend and Floyd Odlum: Their Last Hurrah

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Townsend's presentation at Rand has always seemed to be both a homecoming and hand off at the same time. As a regular researcher at the Pacific Aeronautical Libarary in Santa Monica, he was there when Rand was born.

This library, well-supported by the government and all of the West Coast aerospace firms, offered a collection of old and new aircraft specifications, along with news of national and international developments in planes, drones, and rocketry. Among Its members would have been the dreamers, schemers, and doers who dared to think great sci-fi thoughts of what could be, if only...

Apparently, the Navy's 1946 proposal for an interservice satellite program had infuriated Curtis LeMay. As far as he was concerned, all of space belonged to the air force. and he wasn't sharing. When he put out a call for a counter design,to be completed in a three week time frame, Douglas Aircraft was able to respond with a contract out of their Santa Monica office.

The resulting report,Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-circling Space-Ship https://www.rand.org/pubs/special_memor ... 1827.html. would give rise to the RAND Corporation and to the "systems analysis" approach to management.

By the time Townsend returned to the West Coast, more than two decades later, he had seen all of those sci-fi dreams become reality. He was nearing the end of his career, and his contributions had been cherry-picked by the Navy, the CIA, the NSA, and the NRO. His final gift for Rand was a Rubik's Cube for them to play with. "Solve this puzzle and you will know why you are looking at a propulsion system, a power plant, and a communications resource."

All we know is that once Townsend made the hand-off, he was gone, on to other, even more arcane things at SRI.
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