Ken
"25+ years in the Douglas plant in Long Beach which built literally 10s of thousands of aircraft. The entire plant is GONE. (as are the Convair, Lockheed, Glen Martin, Curtis, Martin Marrietta, LTV, etc etc plants.) "
That's very sad to read, as a 8 then 12 yr old nipper I was taken round both lb and sd plants as a guest, sad to see the diversity of manufacturer's disappear.
Smoothest, coolest aircraft of that era that I flew in were Douglas products btw..