Below is an excerpt of a story I started using the area I grew up in as a backdrop. My idea was to use the factual events to propel my fictional character forward. Each chapter was to have a major factual event lead into my fictional character’s unfolding story. I became stuck when the important factual events left too much time between them, causing my character’s development and story line to jump to far in time to be a cohesive transition for the story’s development. I’m thinking there has to be a way to make it work, hence I’m revisiting it now. The events below are factual, except for the very last sentence when my fictional character arrives.

Casablanca won the Oscar for best picture, Oklahoma opened on Broadway, and polyurethane plastic made its debut. It was the summer of 1943. The United States was a year and a half into World War II, shoe rationing began, and German U-boats dominated the Atlantic. On August 2nd a young Navy lieutenant became a hero and two men, a Navy captain and a CalTech scientist, flew over a remote California desert. They mapped 650 square miles of sand and brush, three mountain ranges, several lake beds sucked dry centuries ago, and one emergency landing airstrip. Two thousand feet off the ground a new concept for testing and developing Naval weaponry was hatched, marking the beginning of a problematic union between military personnel and civilian scientists.

On December 21, 1943 the troops rolled in, leaving a trail of bulging dust behind them. The Inyokern Experiment began with the crude assembly of six Quonset huts and a mess hall. The steel framed huts were anchored to rectangular concrete slabs and covered in corrugated metal. Without windows or doors, the U-shaped huts were vulnerable to the vacillating temperatures. But it was the wind gushing off the southern skirts of the Sierra Nevada’s that tested the mettle of man and machine. It rushed down, scooped up mounds of loose sand, and shot its load across the valley floor. Nothing was safe when the wind and sand merged to make war. It howled a superior tone, a warning of what was to come. The desert would not be an easy victory.

Two days after the first sand storm filled the Quonset huts with six inches of sand the first testing of forward-firing aircraft rockets took place. It failed. Land was cleared eight miles east of the makeshift station. The first Navy built, Navy operated, and civilian housed city was underway. The need for enclosed working and living facilities became a priority, but able bodied men were hard to find. Ads went out in all the major newspapers across the US. “Construction workers needed in remote area. No questions asked. Pay in cash. US Navy.”

They came. By the hundreds. Every bent human life form imaginable came — ex-cons, murders, rapist, gamblers — they all came. A town of tarpaper shacks, adobe huts, and tin can trailers materialized overnight. The wide unpaved main street hosted a single water tower, a hedge of make-shift saloons offering coarse entertainment, several coffee shops, and one general store-post office-gas station combination. The swelling town of Inyokern took on the guise of an old west mining town with its gun packing, high spending, fist fighting characters roaming its sandy streets. These were the men the US Navy hired to build their secret city and build it they did, in record time.

On March 30, 1944 a 5-inch High Velocity Aircraft Rocket, better known as the “Holy Moses”, was successfully launched from a TBF (torpedo bomber, submarine hunting aircraft) flying at 10,000 feet. The blast leaped from one mountain range to another, sending multiple booms throughout the valley floor. And Jean Marie Whitnack, age ten, was delivered to her grandparents by a Greyhound bus.