Second Place Aint Always Bad

I’ve found that one of the worst things to happen to you in economic development is to come in second place. I’d rather come in 10th place than 2nd. In 10th place you quickly move on, while in 2nd place you can drive yourself crazy second guessing what you could have done differently to land the new project. Huntsville, Alabama was such a second place town.

In 1949 the U. S. Air Force was looking for a location for their multi-million dollar Air Engineering Development Center (a.k.a. wind tunnel) somewhere in the South. Huntsville, an obscure cotton town of 16,000, was one of the finalists but “we realized that Tennessee’s powerful congressional delegation forced the Air Force to locate in Tullahoma,” said Tom Johnson who headed up economic development in Northern Alabama at the time. “We were really let down.” Huntsville had come in 2nd place. It was worse than kissing your sister.

But, this time there was a second prize. The U. S. Army was looking for a location for some German rocket scientists. This was no grand wind tunnel. These were former enemies whose “pay is only enough to keep them in cigarettes.” People were outraged. The Federation of American Scientists protested. One townsperson was quoted in the local paper, “The last time our boys had seen Germans, they were shooting at them.” As it turned out, it was the best “second place disaster” to happen to a town.

Early in 1950 Dr. Wernher von Braun and his team began operations in Huntsville on rockets and missiles. Johnson said of the event, “We welcomed the news, but, at the time, we still had rather had the wind tunnel.” A front page article in the May 14, 1950 Huntsville Times headlined prophetically: “Dr. von Braun Says Rocket Flights Possible to the Moon.” Some local residents undoubtedly believed that these German rocket scientists were crazy. Those same residents would literally carry Dr. von Braun on their shoulders thru the streets of Huntsville on July 24, 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Today Huntsville is no longer a quaint cotton town. It is a booming metropolitan area with 250 aerospace companies employing 27,000 employees in this high tech cluster. Today Huntsville with over 150,000 residents is “Rocket City U. S. A.” That wind tunnel is still in Tullahoma which has grown to 18,000 from less than 10,000 in 1950. Sometimes it isn’t so bad to come in second place.