1.THE BOY WHO LIKED EXPLOSIONS
It’s amazing he didn’t hurt himself or anyone else in those days.
—Eugene Stoner’s daughter
The July 13, 1953, issue of Life magazine featured a photo essay capturing Los Angeles’s extraordinary growth. It opened with a photo of tract homes and moving vans extending down a street as far as the eye could see. “Every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, is moving day in Los Angeles,” the article declared.
Hollywood, from Frank Sinatra to Elizabeth Taylor, got a lot of attention. But the industry drawing the most people to Los Angeles was aviation. Tens of thousands worked designing and building airplanes. Aerospace multimillionaire executives such as Howard Hughes held out the prospect that average Joes—war veterans, factory workers, anybody willing to move to L.A.—could make it big if they had a good idea. The area exuded an aura of the new. Disneyland opened in 1955. The Dodgers, stolen from Brooklyn, started playing in L.A. in 1958. Religion got a pseudoscience makeover in Southern California: L. Ron Hubbard started the Church of Scientology in 1954. No city better captured America’s muscular belief in itself.
Here the idea for what would become the AR-15 rifle took shape in the garage of an amateur tinkerer. Eugene Stoner was a man obsessed with engineering problems. He thought about them all the time. When an idea came to him, he scribbled it down, sketching ideas on anything he could find—pads of paper, napkins, restaurant tablecloths. He had no formal training in engineering or gun design and this lack of education, instead of limiting him, gave him the freedom to try out ideas that others wouldn’t consider. He wore glasses and had a fondness for bow ties. His figure was slightly round and his colleagues called him a teddy bear. He refused to swear or spank his children. “Boy that frosts me,” he said when he was upset. He liked to tweak self-important people with a dry sense of humor. He admired smarts, no matter the person’s formal education. He hated attention. When later in life he was asked about his career as one of the most well-known firearms inventors of the twentieth century, he said, “It was kind of a hobby that got out of hand.”
Eugene Morrison Stoner was born on November 22, 1922, near Gosport, Indiana, population seven hundred. His father, thirty-year-old Lloyd Lester Stoner, was working on a farm near his boyhood home. A few years earlier, Lloyd, tall with a square jaw, had traveled from Indiana’s cornfields to fight in France during World War I. His lungs were scarred by a German mustard gas attack. After the war, Lloyd married Britannia “Billie” Morrison, a woman with a soft chin and a far-off look in her eyes. Life was difficult for the couple. Lloyd eked out a living as a farmer, but midwestern winters were hard on his damaged lungs. He often came down with colds and coughs. In 1925, Lloyd, his wife, and their toddler, Eugene, joined throngs of farmers abandoning homesteads in America’s heartland for California, where jobs were plentiful and winters were mild. The Stoners settled in the Coachella Valley, a desert area east of Los Angeles where farmers grew dates, oranges, grapes, and cotton. The dry air soothed Lloyd’s lungs. He started his own business, delivering gas and oil to farmers.
Young Gene Stoner spent his youth in the valley. He played in the dirt with toy trucks and airplanes. He pedaled along the dusty roads on his tricycle and ran through orchards with the family’s Boston terrier. Gene’s father often took him hunting, then a common pastime for American boys. Little Gene had a gentle smile and a far-off look like his mom’s. He wore knickers or overalls and a little cap. On special occasions, he wore a white sailor’s outfit complete with insignia and neckerchief. The boy loved Flash Gordon, a popular comic strip, radio show, and movie serial featuring a muscular hero who used ray guns to battle alien foes.
Gene was fascinated with launching projectiles of all kinds. As a boy of six, he filled a pipe with gunpowder, took it into the desert, and lit it. His first pipe bomb exploded, raising a massive dust cloud. At seven, he built his own cannon. He went to a friend’s father who owned a machine shop, begged for a metal pipe, and persuaded the man to drill holes in it. He got some magnesium from another friend’s father who owned the local drugstore. With these ingredients, he built the primitive cannon and pointed it at a friend’s house across the street. Before Gene could open fire, his father ran to stop him. “I told you to do this at the city dump,” he scolded. At ten years old, Gene was building rockets, also with magnesium. He made mistakes, but learned each time. Once he set up a rocket in the middle of the street. Other boys in the neighborhood cheered and counted down as he lit the fuse. The rocket flew up, then veered and slammed into his own house, blowing a hole in the wall.
“It’s amazing he didn’t hurt himself or anyone else in those days,” his daughter Susan said years later.
When the Great Depression hit, Lloyd’s oil and gas business failed and his marriage with Billie fell apart. Gene’s family decided to send the teen to live in a boardinghouse by himself in Long Beach to attend Long Beach Polytechnic High School. He met a cute and feisty girl named Jean who went to a Catholic girls’ school nearby. She loved hunting and shooting. She wanted to be a pilot like Amelia Earhart. Gene and Jean bonded over their shared interests. He was attracted to her verve, and she was drawn to his unconventional smarts.
“He received average grades, but he was very interested in anything mechanical and there was this curiosity; he was a genius. He was brilliant,” Jean later recalled.
Their names, Gene and Jean, caused confusion, so Jean took to just calling her beau “Stoner.” When Stoner graduated from high school, he had no money for college. So at age eighteen he went to work for Vega Aircraft Corporation, installing weaponry on warplanes. On weekends, the couple drove out into the desert to hunt doves, then drove back to L.A. to see a big band at the Hollywood Bowl. They owned rifles and bows and were good shots. Once they reenacted the famous William Tell legend with Jean placing an apple on her head while Stoner pointed his bow and arrow. Stoner split the apple, and Jean was untouched. “He, we, had a devil-may-care nature—we did a lot of things while looking for enjoyment,” she later wrote.
After Pearl Harbor, Southern California was in a perpetual state of anxiety over a possible Japanese invasion. Stoner’s factory went into overdrive, producing B-17 Flying Fortresses and other aircraft. Stoner installed machine guns on the planes, learning firsthand how the gun’s parts fit together as a system. At home, Stoner and Jean began to build a life together. On July 4, 1942, the couple eloped to Las Vegas. Stoner made an intricate wedding band for Jean. Because she was allergic to gold, he crafted it out of platinum. Both wanted a family, but first Stoner wanted to be a pilot.
He tried to sign up for the army air force. He hoped—as the recruiting posters promised—to “fly and fight with the greatest team in the world.” But the greatest team wasn’t interested, due to Stoner’s poor eyesight. His second choice was the navy, where his uncle had promised to find him a stateside post. Moments after he enlisted in February 1944, a Marine Corps recruiter walked into the room and pointed to several men, including Stoner. Stoner used a pay phone near the recruitment office to deliver the news to his wife, then pregnant with their first child. The Marines assigned Stoner to work in Aviation Ordnance, maintaining large-caliber machine guns on the planes as well as antiaircraft guns. His first assignment was the Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro, California. “He was in heaven,” his daughter Susan recalled. “Imagine being twenty years old, obsessed with guns, cannons, and then being able to work with the big stuff during a war.”
In June 1945, Stoner shipped off for the Philippines. The couple devised a code that Stoner used in his letters to let her know where he was and what he was doing even though it was prohibited under military protocol. Jean used it too for important news. “Our second child was due and I wanted to let him know as quickly as I could,” she recalled.
Stoner never saw battle. He spent his time repairing guns and doing “a certain amount of experimenting on different types of machine guns,” he said later. On his own time, the compulsive inventor designed two different .30-caliber rifles that were similar to the standard U.S. military rifle at the time, the dependable if heavy M1. Stoner studied the inner workings of that rifle extensively, trying to figure out ways to improve it. Stoner was excited by such engineering challenges, but he had mixed feelings about the military. He wasn’t an “Oorah!” kind of Marine. When he repaired military weapons or worked on his own guns, Stoner sought out the most efficient solution to whatever mechanical problem faced him. But he felt that the military didn’t favor efficiency. Bureaucratic inertia usually won the day.
A few months after Stoner went overseas, the war in the Pacific ended. Troops came home as conquering heroes, but Stoner was one of many who stayed behind after the fighting stopped. Stationed in China, he continued to experiment with firearms. When he came back in February 1946, he brought a special gift for his wife: gun parts from the Far East. He used them to build her a homemade rifle. Jean loved it.
He found a job repairing slot machines and another making false teeth. The young father needed money to support his family. In February 1947, he took a job at Whittaker Corporation, which manufactured aircraft valves. He worked in the machine shop but spent much of his time fixing designs that came down from the engineering department. His intelligence caught the attention of Bob Wilson, who ran both the shop and the engineering department. After a few years, Wilson brought Stoner upstairs to work with the engineers, even though Stoner had no engineering degree. He received a cold welcome. “What do you mean taking him up here? He’s not a graduate engineer,” the head design engineer said in front of Stoner.
But the head design engineer also had a nurturing side and spent hours showing Stoner how to solve engineering problems. By 1951, Stoner and Wilson decided to strike out on their own as consultants, designing valves and other parts for aviation corporations. He found success in spite of his lack of formal education, teaching himself the principles of engineering, physics, and materials science. “Once I got established in that thing, nobody asked me whether I graduated from engineering school or not,” Stoner recalled. Stoner had an ability to dream up new creations and to visualize mechanical systems. “I’m not sure if I had been a graduate engineer that I would’ve tried all the ideas I had because some of the ideas from an engineering standpoint did not look to be feasible,” he recalled.
The Stoners—Jean, Gene, Patty, and Michael—had moved to a small white stucco house on a corner lot in Westchester, a neighborhood adjacent to Los Angeles International Airport. Westchester had wide streets, palm trees, and ranch-style homes. Stoner spent a lot of his time in the detached garage behind the house. The Stoner family car was never parked inside. The little building was Stoner’s gun lab. Inside, he stored tooling machines to cut, bore, and grind parts. He refused, despite his wife’s pleading, to move closer to the beach because he worried sand and salty air would ruin them. His daughter Patty remembered seeing prototypes of guns alongside piles of mechanical drawings when she wandered into the garage.
“He was a very quiet person,” Jean said. “But if you talked about guns, cars, or planes, he’d talk all night.”
In many ways, Stoner was a quintessential American male. The 1950s was the decade of the hobbyist inventor. Popular Mechanics magazine found lots of readers like Stoner who wanted to know about the latest advances in technology. They believed they could move the country forward with the power of their ingenuity—and strike it rich in the process. Every day after returning home from work, Stoner would eat the dinner that Jean had prepared (beef Stroganoff was his favorite), take a quick nap, and then walk to the garage to work on his guns.
“We were like the 1950s family. It was California. It was booming after the war. All the aerospace was booming,” said daughter Susan, who was born in 1954. “I knew from my dad, I felt from him, the future was wide open.”
Copyright © 2023 by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson
