It's a good read, but I always wondered how much is embellished. I don't know if the pizza ovens anecdote being present there confirms its authenticity, it could be that Ben Rich had just heard about it through the grapevine or even that this book was how the story got spread in the first place.

This; also, the more interesting tidbit is that the US at that point hadnt really developed anything with titanium (for the same reason; most of it was in the USSR) so Lockheed had to develop all the tooling for the SR-71 internally as well, just to be able to work with it --regular steel tools simply couldn't handle titanium.

+1 on the "Skunk Works" book just for the stories...