Murry and Audree welcomed two more boys into their family in the next four years -- the fair-haired Dennis Carl Wilson coming in late 1944 and Carl Dean Wilson, another dark-featured boy, at the end of 1946. Moving his family to a modern, if cozy, two-bedroom ranch house on West 119th Street in the blue-collar suburb of Hawthorne, Murry rolled his sleeves up over his bulky forearms and set to scratching out his own slice of the postwar economic boom. He'd already made some progress, jumping to a junior administration job at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company just after Brian's birth and then, just as the war ended, to a foreman's position in the manufacturing plant of AiResearch, an aeronautics company that made parts for Seattle-based Boeing Aircraft's growing line of civilian and military airplanes.
By the end of World War II, the South Bay revolved around the thriving aerospace industry. Borne up by the dual demands of a rapidly expanding civilian airline market and the just-as-rapidly-growing tension with the Soviet Union, aeronautics presented opportunities for hardworking men that were seemingly as limitless as their own aspirations. But while Murry's timing was spot-on, and he was a tireless worker with a penchant for big ideas, nothing came easily for him. A gruesome accident at Goodyear cost him his left eye, and that twist of fate only emphasized an aggressive-to-bellicose personality that tended to alienate him from co-workers and superiors alike. Stalled on the lower rungs of management and increasingly frustrated with his flat career arc, Murry descended into dark moods all too reminiscent of his own father's. Still, unwilling to resign himself entirely to the old man's fate, he scraped together as much cash as he could and opened his own business, an industrial equipment rental outfit he called A.B.L.E. (Always Better Lasting Equipment) Machinery. From that point on, Murry Wilson would be his own boss. The arrangement suited him just fine.
So in the mornings Murry would dress in his pressed white shirts and skinny tie knotted just so, his horn-rimmed glasses perched on his thick, bulldog's face, his suit jacket straining against the prominent belly and muscular shoulders that testified both to his appetite for work and for the rewards awaiting a man at the end of his day. Steering his Ford down the quiet, sun-washed streets of mid-1950s Hawthorne, he'd see a hundred houses just like the one he shared with Audree and his three boys: small but neat, with a lush lawn and a wide driveway for the late-model Ford, Buick, or Chevy, its tail fins gleaming in the cool morning light.
