Episode 12 with Marty Andrade is up now. Let me know what you guys think!
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This was a great podcast. It was around an hour and forty minutes. I could have listened for double that. I hope there is a round 2 with Martin. I was particularly interested in hearing the mention of RMI (titanium manufacturer). This was the first time I had heard mention of it since Tom Kaye (there was a detailed post a while back). One of the prevailing narratives was that Cooper worked at Boeing. When I was an amateur in this case, I think I believed that. But now I realize that the Boeing connection is all too convenient. A man from Seattle who worked at Boeing hijacks a plane in Portland, yet he is never identified. That just does not fit.
I've done a decent amount of research on RMI, its partners, and its competitors in the titanium industry during the 1970's. Contrary to popular belief, the titanium business in the US was actually booming in the 1970's. We even had to import titanium from Russia to keep up with demand (hard to believe).
RMI Company (formerly known as Reactive Metals, Inc) was a partnership between United States Steel and National Distillers & Chemical Corporation. One of the largest titanium mines in the world was actually in upstate New York. There were a number of titanium manufacturer's headquartered east of the Mississippi, and many of these had branches or subsidiaries in the Northeast (as mentioned about RMI in Ohio in the podcast). Titanium Metals Corporation of America, the US's largest titanium producer in 1968 had their headquarters in New York City (later moved to New Jersey).
What does this mean? From my perspective, it means that if the tie was Cooper's, or from a colleague of his, then focusing solely on Boeing or Tektronix could be shortsighted. Not only did some of these companies mine titanium, they produced it and sold it. And commercially pure titanium (found on the tie) was not as uncommon as one might think. Like the CRT tube discussion, just because there was CRT materials on the tie, does not mean these came during the manufacturing process, they could have come from further downstream, during assembly or usage.
Titanium had a number of qualities, one was that it was light weight, and one was that it had anti-corrosive properties.
Where did the tie come from? Industrial chemicals? Possibly, but there are other possibilities and other industries that used commercially pure titanium (mainly military aircraft, but not only).
Safe to say if the tie was Cooper's, then he was not a school teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, etc. I'd personally like to hear people's recent thoughts on the tie.
