When I was little, my friend’s grandfather worked at Convair in San Diego. I remember an Atlas missile on display. My memory isn’t clear whether it was displayed on its side, or if it was upright, or if there was one of each.
Do any San Diegans remember this? Is/are the missile/missiles still displayed on the same site as they were in the 1960s? Have they been moved to the Air & Space Museum? Are they someplace else? Where was this facility? (i.e., what was its address?)
I wouldn’t know an Atlas missile from a book of maps, but this is striking memory chords with me. Was Convair in Kearney Mesa, and was this displayed outside? Was it green? Or am I thinking of something else?
The SM-65 Atlas missile would have had bare, unpainted steel skin. When you see a green rocket, this is typically an anti-fungal coating applied to the cork TPS on the outside of a solid propellant rocket motor case such as the Minuteman motors.
Stranger
I remember a lawn. Next to it was a tan stone ‘wall’, and a sidewalk ramped up next to its side. On top of this ‘wall’ was, IIRC, a silver Atlas missile lying on its side. (But I still seem to remember an upright one. I was only about 5 years old.)
The facility may well have been in Kearny Mesa. That’s only a few miles from where we lived in Clairemont. The images I find googling ‘convair’ and ‘kearny mesa’ are tantalisingly familiar. Not definitive, but familiar.
My father worked for General Dynamics when I was a kid and played for the company baseball team. They had their home games at “Missile Park”. I remember my sister and I running around underneath the missile when I was 4 or 5 or so.
“Missile Park” sounds familiar.
I wonder if your father new Ernie with his Hudsons?
Stranger
So, what happened to it?
That article is almost 20 years old!
General Dynamics no longer makes rockets. The divisions which did (including Convair, which designed and built the Atlas) were long ago sold to Lockheed or McDonnell Douglas or elsewise deactivated. I believe the area where Missile Park used to be is now a public park, and would imagine that the County of San Diego probably took down the missile as an attractive nuisance which would be costly to maintain and would attract graffiti.
Stranger
According to the article, the missile was donated to the San Diego Aerospace Museum. Wikipedia in turn says the museum has it at their Gillespie Field annex.
Hmmm…Clairemont Mesa Blvd (or was it Kearny Mesa Blvd) a couple miles east of the 163 freeway, right? There were (are?) a bunch of tech companies over there, specializing in military aircraft tech because NAS (now MCAS) Miramar is just a few football fields north.
I vaguely remember Convair either became or was bought by GenDyn. My brother’s best friends worked for GD for a while. It seems to me that GD and Lockheed and Martin existed separately for a while. My brother’s friend used to talk about the ‘scheme’ for engineers: Work a couple years for GD, go to Lockheed (because they respected GD engineers) and get a higher title/salary; go to Martin (because they thought a lot of Lockheed engineers) and get a higher title/salary; Go back to GD (because they greatly respected Martin engineers) and get a higher title/salary – accomplishing in 3-4 years what would take 8 years of staying in GD. 
By the time I left Sandy Eggo, Lockheed and Martin were one big corporation and GD had been gone for a while – I heard a lot of GD employees moved (with their projects) to L/M with pay cuts.
–G!