Dad, circa the 1960s

Gerald Keerbs is the fourth man from the left.
He is wearing his trademark bow tie.

I honestly don't know where or when this picture was taken or who the other men are in this picture.  The setting does remind me a lot of what the inside of the offices at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, CA looked like.  Dad took us there as kids for visits and open houses.

Here is how a Keerbs came to live in California:

After graduating from Purdue University in 1956 with a Bachelor's of Science in Civil Engineering, Dad was lured West to California in the late 1950s or early 1960s by an employment offer from Northrup. By 1965, he was working for The Aerospace Corporation.  He spent 28 years there until he retired in 1993.

Much of the work Dad did for The Aerospace Corporation was classified, which means he could not talk about it at home.  But as time moves on and those secrets become declassified, we might get a better glimpse at what he did.

Case in point: I found a document entitled A Study of  Buckling and Snapping Under Dynamic Load, Prepared by M.H. Lock of the Applied Mechanics Division, Laboratory Operations at the Aerospace Corporation dated December 1967.

In the foreword is this mention of our Dad:

"The author expresses thanks to Mr. Gerald Keerbs of the Computation and Data Processing Center for assistance in the numerical phases of this study."

Perhaps through the magic of the Internet, the other men in this photo or their relatives might stumble across this post and leave me a comment with their names and confirmation of the location where this picture was taken.

Family Portrait 1972

From left to right:
front row - Selena, Amanda, Romi and Eric
back row - Gerald and Charlene