In 1961, employees at the Lockheed Corporation, part of what is now the aerospace company and the world’s largest defense contractor Lockheed Martin, paid a peculiar tribute to a Bay Area inventor. They helped reconstruct the machine that killed him. A better tribute might be this gray obelisk at Santa Clara University, which commemorates a spectacular display he provided for the people of Santa Clara. John J. Montgomery, one of several “fathers of aviation,” died in 1911 while testing his new glider in the Evergreen area in San Jose. It…
