AeroE, can you please tell me where the location is?  I have always thought it was Edwards AFB, or GE in Cincinnati.  My dad died in '95 and this is one of the pictures nobody knew about until after

I am about 99% certain that is in front of building 42 at McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis.  The factory building to their left, building 1 & 2, was built during WWII, and a duplicate was built in Columbus.  Building 42 was used for flight test, production and experimental, and I believe it was built after McDonnell Aircraft bought out Curtiss-Wright, but I don't have a date.  It's possible there was a similar hangar in Columbus or Cincinnati, the architect designed many similar facilities for the government during WWII.

I showed the photo to our old timer, but there was no one that he recognized.  There are two, maybe three that look familiar, but I couldn't begin to come up with names.

Thanks.  I'll try to dig into it more.  My 77 year old mom was my dad's assistant back in the day and she does not recognize any one else either.

Funny story:  when I was about 16 and living in Wichita KS near MConnell AFB (dad was at Boeing), I used to hang out at the park swimming pool, which was right underneath the flight path for the base.   Twin F-4s would regularly pass by low overhead on approach, and the screaming growl was so loud everyone had to stop and wait for them to pass.  One day my dad decided to come to the pool and bring my little brother.  I wanted to be a fighter pilot at that time, but had no real clue what my dad did besides "engineer".  After two F-4s passed overhead, I turned to my dad and said "those are soooo cool.  I want to fly one someday."  He looked sideways at me and said, "ya think so? Well, I designed the engine nozzle in the back.  She'll take care of you."   I about shit my pants.

I have bad eyes, couldn't get in for pilot.

RIP Dad

Here is a link with the interesting story of the plant in St. Louis.

https://dnr.mo.gov/shpo/docs/moachp/Curtiss-Wright%20Aeroplane%20Factory.pdf

Page 54 has a photo of the engineering floor where I started.  The only difference is that we were packed much tighter with a mix of boards and desks.

Page 7 has a photo of the location where the photo of your dad would have been taken.  Building 42 is on the left, the bump out for the radio room was removed sometime after the facility was sold.

That was a remarkable building.  I posted a photo earlier of a view looking in the south main door at the F-4 production during Viet Nam.  This is the door visible from the airport terminal building.  In the glory days of fighter manufacturing in the late 80's through early 90's, we were building F-15's (3 variations overlapped for a short time, C's, D's, and E's), F-18C's and D's, AV-8B's and TAV-8B's plus the GR variants, and T-45's; the building was a gloriously busy madhouse.  Final assembly of the AV-8B had to be moved to the north half of building 45 for room to work.

The basement still contained the tooling shop, loft, and some machine tools, mostly small stuff like screw machines.  A tunnel led under the railroad tracks to building 27 (owned by GKN now) to the largest numerically controlled machine shop in the free world with about 1 million square feet under one roof.  The year before I worked as a co-op student in liaison in that building about 105000 individual details were produced.  I salvaged CF-101, Space Shuttle, and MD-10 parts along with the parts for fighters.  The adjacent building with sheet metal, some composite assembly, and the laser welders was similar size.  Just West of the building 42 I described was b. 45, and then a string of small shops for anodizing and other operations that needed to be isolated.

The buildings that should have been preserved at Lambert were on the NW corner of the field a little farther west from the plant, the original passenger terminal and a few hangars operated by Tiger or Zantop built in the '30's from brick in the
art deco style stood until the mid 80's.  The terminal in particular was a cool building.  Zantop let us park our airplanes on their ramp on the rare times we flew to work.  That didn't really work out due to the walk from there to the offices, let alone the hassle of getting an airplane ready to go for a 15 minute flight.

I partnered in an airplane with the pilot of that airplane.

I think the first time we flew together he giggled like a girl when I did a tail slide and flop over backwards at the top of a hammerhead turn.  He's a good guy, and still around.  Liked bunts for some inexplicable reason.

An errant wrench in the controls.

In the days when I worked on the Harrier one of the flight line mechanics modified nosewheel steering parts because he thought the hole in one was the wrong size.  These parts had been intentionally designed so they could not be assembled on the wrong side.

On the first taxi for a production test flight the pilot started across the ramp, tried to steer toward the gate, and got the wrong response.  He reduced power and tried again for sanity check, then shut 'er down and called for a tow.  I think that mechanic got pulled off the flight test ramp and probably put on a sucky job, considering how things worked.