It’s a quarter to 1 on a recent Friday afternoon, and a small caravan of white cars is making its way along sandstone bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As the caravan moves east through the milky gray fog, the passengers inside catch glimpses of a metal tower looming in the distance.
The weathered structure stands tall and proud, much like the mythological Greek deities for which it’s named.
For more than four decades, the tower served as the supportive component of the launching pad for Titan and Atlas rockets at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc. Today, the Sun has come to tour Space Launch Complex 4 (called “slick 4” for short) to get a glimpse of living history.
The rockets are now long gone, but the launch pad’s command center is still fully functional—thanks, in large part, to technology designed and installed by Quintron, a Santa Maria-based communications company.
Headquartered in an unassuming office building on South Blosser Road, Quintron engineers and manufactures high-tech communications and security systems that have been used by the U.S. military, NASA, and various three-letter intelligence agencies.
But you’d never know it, based on the employees’ welcoming, “we’ve-got-nothing-to-hide” attitudes.
“We’re what you’d call a low-profile company. We’re not laid back exactly, but we keep a low profile. We believe in taking care of our employees and giving back to the community,” owner and co-founder Jim “Mac” McGlothlin recently told the Sun.
Not long after, he tried to sell a reporter a raffle ticket for a local nonprofit’s upcoming fundraiser.
“Here at Quintron, we don’t really believe in micromanaging,” McGlothlin said. “Our method is to turn the ingenuity of the workforce loose and see what they can accomplish.”
And over the last 40-plus years, Quintron has accomplished quite a lot.
The little startup that could
Quintron’s story began in the late 1960s, when two civilian communications specialists at Vandenberg Air Force Base—inspired by
the era’s penchant for the American Dream and their own ingenuity—decided to found their own company.
McGlothlin and Elton Hammers both worked for ITT Communications Systems, providing on-base technology services to the U.S. Air Force.
While installing telephones and other communication systems, McGlothlin realized, “You know, I think we could do something like this on our own.”
“Elton and I first talked about it, and then [Bryan] Thompson”—a third ITT employee—“came in,” McGlothlin recalled.
A management shuffle at ITT gave the three friends and colleagues the push they needed to test the entrepreneurial waters. Not long after they moved to Santa Ana, a budding technology-centered community, to set up shop. Also along the way, the trio added two more business associates to its founding board: marketing specialist Jay Nixon and retired Air Force Gen. Joseph Blemaier.
On Jan. 27, 1970, the men created Quintron—“quin” being the Latin root for five and “tron,” the Greek suffix indicating an instrument or tool. The technology industry of the 1970s was much different than it is today: The personal computer had yet to be developed, everything was still stored in analog, and the Bell System dominated the telephone market.
“We left ITT to put closed-circuit TV systems in grocery stores for the Kroger company, which was headquartered in Texas,” McGlothlin said.
The chain wanted to modernize its security system. But the bid—Quintron’s first—fell through.
“I called them up several days before and said, ‘We’re all ready to go’ … and there was this long pause on the other end of the phone,” he remembered.
Undeterred by the setback, the quintet pored over pages of The Commerce Business Daily for contracting bids. They pursued several, and ended up securing two: a telephone installation project at Vandenberg and a job for the Federal Aviation Administration. Then both of those bids fell through, too.
“We got to the point where we didn’t know if this was going to work or not,” McGlothlin said. “The recession was just starting, and Orange County businesses were closing their doors every day.”
Enter the U.S. military—again.
First, Quintron was contracted to refurbish some vans for the Navy. Then the company netted work designing and installing alarm and phone systems for the Air Force’s Western Range Control Center in Hawaii. That project caught the attention of higher ups at their old stomping ground, Vandenberg, and soon Quintron’s founders found themselves in a bidding war with their former employer, ITT.
“That was a tough choice. But we had to do it; we had no choice,” McGlothlin said. “We talked to a lawyer about it and he said, ‘Well, you gotta make a living.’”
Quintron got the bid, and McGlothlin and crew had 12 days to completely overhaul the base’s communications systems and phase in new technicians.
After that, the company’s workload skyrocketed to new heights.
The golden space age
Around the same time Quintron formed, the U.S. government started developing a new program called the Space Transportation System, more popularly known as the Space Shuttle program.
By 1971, NASA had designed and started to develop a winged, manned spacecraft to provide astronauts, the Department of Defense, and commercial agencies a less expensive way to travel into the cosmos.
President Richard Nixon officially launched the Space Shuttle program in January of 1972, but it took nearly a decade to come to fruition.
Meanwhile Quintron was busy outfitting the communications systems for Vandenberg’s Space Launch complexes. At the center of the system was the company’s brainchild, DICES I, a digital voice communication system. The technology combined various forms of communication—dial-up lines, radio circuits, and public address systems—into one fluid command station. Using DICES I, Air Force officials could create hundreds of conference calls at the flick of a switch.
When asked to describe DICES I—and its eventual successors DICES II through IV, DICES VOIP, and more—in layman’s terms, systems engineer Bill Thompson said, “It’s a communication and control system designed to support flight research, launch pad activities, and other Department of Defense applications.
“It’s used where there’s a need for critical communication involving hundreds of people to support a flight mission,” he continued. “Instead of having five phones on your desk, six hand-held radio devices, and a PA system to control, you have all of those devices under one system and one head set.”
When word came out in the early ’80s that NASA wanted to develop a West Coast launch command for the Space Shuttle program at Vandenberg, Quintron quickly created and entered a bid.
The company already had first-hand experience with the Space Shuttle program: Quintron developed and installed communications systems for NASA’s mission control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, as well as the shuttle’s landing facility at Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base.
NASA ultimately awarded Quintron the contract for the West Coast project, and the company’s employees set to work.
“We were really gearing up for the Space Shuttle program. We were very excited about it,” said Andy Francis, a launch communications specialist at Vandenberg and a former Quintron employee. “We were all running around like a swarm of ants on an anthill.”
The base was just 100 days away from launching the West Coast program when tragedy struck: On Jan. 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded approximately 73 seconds into its flight, instantly killing its seven crew members, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. The accident shook the Space Shuttle program to its core. Not long after, NASA shut down launch activity on the East Coast and discontinued the West Coast facility.
“That was a difficult time. There were a lot of hurt feelings between the East and West Coast people,” Francis said. “We felt [the East Coast people] had blown up their space shuttle and now we were getting our launch program shut down.”
As a result, nearly 3,000 people lost their jobs, including 200 Quintron employees.
“The company almost collapsed when the Vandenberg Space Shuttle center got shut down,” Quintron co-founder McGlothlin said. “But we had a good inventory of products and good people who were willing to take pay cuts and furloughs. We weathered the storm and started in a new market: commercial manufacturing for companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.”
But looking back on the Space Shuttle program, McGlothlin said, “Our company was very blessed to be a part of that. … We had the time of our lives doing the things that we wanted to do.”
Quintron’s involvement with the Space Shuttle changed the dynamics of the company by launching it permanently into the territory of multi-million dollar contracts.
Of course the Space Shuttle program has benefited modern-day technology as well.
“We got GPS from the Space Shuttle program, and the Hubble Telescope, and technology in the medical and engineering fields,” systems engineer Thompson said. “If not for that program, we would not have made the investments we did as a country to develop technology for the
future.”
Technology is always evolving
Quintron technology has been an integral part of some of the most groundbreaking systems in history, from the Space Shuttle to Sea Launch to commercial rockets and
beyond.
The company’s engineers have developed DICES I and its other generations into DICES VOIP, an IP-based voice communications system. The touch-screen-enabled software can be applied to almost any computer system, including a smart phone. Using DICES VOIP, clients can establish and monitor thousands of conference calls over the Internet.
“DICES VOIP has many different applications,” Thompson said. “It can be used by public safety, at the borders, and at the state and county levels and other municipals.”
Quintron has also ventured into the world of high-tech security with AccessNSite. The access control software allows companies to use employee badges, as well as image, signature, and retina captures to monitor security clearance.
Founder McGlothlin said the key to Quintron’s longevity is being able to adapt quickly to change.
One way the company does that is by creating fiscal reserves for research and development.
“We strive to use 10 percent of our revenue for research and development,” he said. “If you don’t do that, the company dies. It’s just like a plant; if you don’t give it nutrients and fertilizer, it’ll die and the fruit on the plant will die, too.”
The company also strives to plant seeds of knowledge in the minds of the country’s future workforce.
Quintron currently provides network infrastructure for several school districts, and some of the company’s employees are involved in the science and math curricula at local middle and high schools.
“It’s exciting to bring technology into the classrooms. Today’s advantages for learning are astounding,” McGlothlin said. “We need a future labor force that’s strong in mathematics.”
Mathematics, he said, is the key to understanding and developing the technology of the future.
Contact Managing Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamaria sun.com.
This article appears in Sep 1-8, 2011.