Arrow Development

Arrow Development was an amusement park ride and roller coaster design and manufacturing company, incorporated in California on November 16, 1945, and based in Mountain View. Arrow was founded by Angus "Andy" Anderson, Karl Bacon, William Hardiman and Edgar Morgan. Originally located at 243 Moffett Boulevard, they relocated to a larger facility at 1555 Plymouth Street after Walt Disney Productions purchased one third of Arrow in 1960. They also had offices at 820 Huff Avenue. By 1956, secretary Bill Hardiman, and Angus Anderson, then vice president, had sold their interests in Arrow to Wharton graduate Walter Schulze, who then became Arrow's secretary-treasurer and vice president. Walter and his wife had been doing accounting for several small companies in the Bay Area, including Duro-Bond Bearing, where he likely heard of Arrow. Schulze left Arrow after its sale to Rio Grande Industries. In 1979, Arrow listed over a dozen types of rides in their catalog including 15 corkscrews, five looping coasters, 12 runaway mine trains, 43 flumes and 77 automotive, for a total of more than 200 rides installed at nearly 100 locations around the world. Similarly named Arrow Dynamics, eventual successor to Arrow Development, was incorporated in Delaware on January 10, 1986 by Ron Toomer, Otis Hughes, David Klomp, Ray Crandall and Brent Meikle.

Andy, Bill, Ed and Karl met while working at the Hendy Iron Works in Sunnyvale, CA. The Hendy company had a contract with the US Navy to build torpedo launchers and marine steam engines. By 1942, Hendy was building hundreds of marine engines for Liberty ships. The number of employees increased to over 11,500 to meet demand. In June 1943, the union began enforcing a four-month ban on overtime, during which all machinists were to quit work after eight hours and refuse to work on Sundays. Hendy responded by announcing that all machinists who refused to work overtime would be discharged. Both Karl and Ed would recall later that being told to be on the picket line motivated them to start their own company.

Neither Bacon nor Morgan saw active duty in the military, although Ed and his younger brother Eugene enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Ed was given a deferment based on his employment at Hendy. Eugene was killed in action in the South Pacific on December 16, 1944 while serving with the 868th Bombardment Squadron, flying special radar equipped B-24 Liberators designed for secret night bombing and escort missions.

During the early years, Arrow Development sold used machine tools and made replacement parts for trucks, which were scarce after the war. Their first big job was building test run-in furnaces for the US Navy. They also performed machining and assembly work for Luscombe, Hewlett Packard, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and help the NASA Ames Research Center develop 25 balloon-suspended capsules for high altitude research with monkeys, in preparation for the Mercury Program.