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Text
The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection
The Museum of Flight
Seattle, Washington
Betty Riley Stockard
Interviewed by: Dan Hagedorn
Date: March 19, 2014
Location: Kirkland, Washington
This interview was made possible with generous support from
Mary Kay and Michael Hallman
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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Abstract:
Retired stewardess Betty R. Stockard is interviewed about her career with United Airlines. She
discusses her experiences in the airline industry during the 1940s, such as the interview and
training process, memorable encounters with passengers, and her flights along the West Coast
and to Hawaii. She also recounts a story in which she served as a wartime courier for an
important package. Other topics discussed include her childhood and college years in Montana;
her thoughts on the Douglas DC-3, DC-4, and DC-6 aircraft; and her life after retiring from
United Airlines.
Biography:
Betty Stockard was among the first specially trained flight attendants and attended a number of
celebrities during her time as a flight attendant for United Airlines. She also worked for the
Boeing Company.
Elizabeth “Betty” Jean Riley Stockard was born on May 16, 1919, in Kalispell, Montana to
Valjean Riley and Charlotte Dryer. She graduated high school from Flathead County High
School, which is on an Indian Reservation. Her family made their living as farmers, selling dairy
products such as butter and milk. Growing up on a dairy farm, Stockard says her favorite food
was ice cream due to it being in abundance on the farm.
After graduating from high school, Stockard knew she wanted to attend college, so she saved up
money working at a women’s dress shop and stayed with a family friend while attending the
University of Montana in Missoula. There were only two major options for women at that time at
this university: home economics and business. Stockard decided on home economics but took a
break before her senior year due to the United States’ involvement in World War II.
In 1942 Stockard began working for the Boeing Company at Boeing Field in Washington before
seeing a United Airlines job posting regarding “stewardess” (flight attendant) positions.
Following this, Stockard began the lengthy interview and training process before becoming a
flight attendant. She was among the first women to be specially trained to become flight
attendants, as all previous flight attendants had been nurses. During this process, Stockard took
her first airplane flight from Seattle, Washington to San Francisco, California.
During her time as a flight attendant, Stockard had interactions with a number of celebrities and
famous figures, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Stockard also met her husband, Wallace
Raymond Stockard, on a flight she was attending. Stockard also had lengthy experience flying in
the Douglas DC-4 airplane that came into use during World War II.
After being a flight attendant, Stockard married Wallace Stockard and had four children, three
boys and one girl. By 1950, their family was living in San Mateo, California but later returned to
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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the Seattle area. Wallace died in 1990 in Seattle; Betty was still living in the area as of 2014.
Biographical information derived from interview and additional information provided by
interviewee.
Interviewer:
Dan Hagedorn served as Senior Curator and Director of Collections at The Museum of Flight
from 2008 until his retirement in 2016. Prior to his tenure at TMOF, he was Adjunct Curator and
Research Team Leader at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Hagedorn is
a graduate of Villa Maria College, the State University of New York, and the Command and
General Staff College, and served in the U.S. Armed Forces for almost three decades. He has
written numerous books and articles about aviation history in general and Latin American
aviation in particular. For his work in documenting Latin American aviation history, he received
the Orden Merito Santos-Dumont from the Brazilian Government in 2006. Since his retirement
in 2016, Hagedorn has served as a Curator Emeritus at the Museum.
Restrictions:
Permission to publish material from The Museum of Flight Oral History Program must be
obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
Videography:
Videography by TMOF volunteers and staff.
Transcript:
Transcribed by Pioneer Transcription Services. Reviewed by TMOF volunteers and staff.
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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Index:
Introduction and personal background............................................................................................ 5
College years ................................................................................................................................... 7
Move to Seattle and becoming a United Airlines stewardess ......................................................... 9
Stewardess career .......................................................................................................................... 15
Memorable passengers and flights ................................................................................................ 19
Courtship, marriage, and service to Hawaii .................................................................................. 24
Courier mission ............................................................................................................................. 26
Flight with former prisoners of war .............................................................................................. 27
In-flight emergency involving a Boeing B-17 aircraft ................................................................. 28
Flying a Douglas DC-3 aircraft..................................................................................................... 29
Retirement and family life ............................................................................................................ 31
Advice for future generations ....................................................................................................... 32
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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Betty Riley Stockard
[START OF INTERVIEW]
00:00:00
[Introduction and personal background]
[production talk]
DAN HAGEDORN: I’m Dan Hagedorn. I’m the curator at The Museum of Flight at Boeing
Field in Seattle, Washington. It’s March the 19th, 2014. I am at the home of Betty Riley
Stockard, [address in Kirkland, Washington]. Betty, I’d like you to tell me your full name
and spell it for me, please.
BETTY RILEY STOCKARD:
Well, my full name is Elizabeth, and that’s E-L-I-Z-A-B-ET-H, Jean, middle name, Riley, R-I-L-E-Y, Stockard, S-T-O-C-K-A-R-D.
DH:
Very good. Thank you. And now I’m going to ask you a question a lady is not properly
asked. I’d like to ask you when you were born and where you were born.
BRS: Well, that’s one thing I know for sure. May 16th, that I was born, 1919 in Kalispell,
Montana. And Kalispell is—it was a medium-sized town in the 1900s there in the
northwest part of Montana, up near Glacier National Park. I always put in a plug for
Glacier Park because it’s such a beautiful place.
DH:
And what were your mom and dad’s names?
BRS: My father’s name was Valjean, V-A-L-J-E-A-N. And it’s rather an unusual name for
now, but when he was born, oh, way back in about 1890, his mother apparently was
reading the story about Valjean in—let’s see now. I’ve got to stop to think of the name of
the book. But anyway, she was so impressed with the character that she named her baby
who was to be born—was born at that time, Valjean. He had no middle name. Just
Valjean Riley.
And my mother’s name was Charlotte Dryer, D-R-Y-E-R. Charlotte Dryer. She was born
in Tacoma. My father had been born back in Wisconsin. So they met midway in
Montana.
DH:
Did you have brothers and sisters?
BRS: I had two brothers and two sisters. One brother—a third brother had passed away. But
two brothers and two sisters. I was number two in the lineup, so the three younger ones
and myself.
DH:
Did you go through your primary schooling and high school there in Montana?
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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BRS: Yes. Yes.
DH:
What was the name of the school you attended?
BRS: Flathead County High School in Flat—that was Flathead County. It’s an Indian
Reservation. I was actually born on an Indian Reservation, and my father—parents
started a little town called Niarada. It’s on the map still, but there’s not any of Niarada
left now. This was in 1915 that they met out there because land was given away. First it
was—they’d give it to—they gave it to the Indians, the government. And the Indians
weren’t farmers. They just couldn’t make a living. They needed something that had
buffalo and wild game on it. And this was very rocky, barren land. No forest around it. It
was just a ways—about 30 miles from Flathead Lake, a big lake there. And it was all
declared Indian Territory.
DH:
So what did your father do?
BRS: Well, first he farmed for the first—and built up this little community there, which was
mainly Indians and early farmers because they had gotten land free, 160 acres apiece, just
by applying for it. He was 20 years old, I think, when—just out of high school, and he
had the—a longing to do things, of course. And he read about this back in Wisconsin.
Came out, applied for the land, and it was given to him.
DH:
Very good.
BRS: And my mother was—her mother was a widow and she had no income, and my mother
was young and not through school hardly yet. So she applied for some land there. I think
that was kind of farfetched on her side, but she thought maybe she could make a go of it.
Well, so my mother and father met there, and they started this little community. And I
lived there—I was born in Kalispell. Niarada was about 60 miles away, but just—I was
born in Kalispell just because they took me there for the birth, you know. Then we moved
there finally. My father went into business with two friends who opened a dairy, a
commercial dairy. They did—pasteurized the milk, made cream, made cottage cheese and
butter, and it was a—over the years, that’s where I lived until I—
DH:
So you grew up a farm girl?
BRS: I was a farm girl. And if you ask me what my favorite ice—favorite food is, I’ll tell you.
DH:
I’d like to know that.
BRS: [laughs] Ice cream. We always had ice cream. We could have all the ice cream just
because they made it there in the dairy. And it was called the Glacier Dairy.
DH:
Very good.
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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BRS: It was there until 1955, and it was then—the city grew up around it too much and—
DH:
So you must have graduated from high school around 1935, ’36?
BRS: ‘37.
DH:
’37.
BRS: 1937, yeah.
DH:
Were you a good student?
BRS: I was average. Maybe a little—maybe—fairly good, you know.
DH:
Any activities while you were in school?
BRS: Well, I’ll tell you, we—I always had to work. I say, always had to work. People, the kids,
in their teenage years, mostly all, worked just to supplement their own things. So I
worked after school, and I worked in a ladies’ dress shop. And my brothers would—when
they were 15 on would go to work in the dairy to begin with and then branched out into
other things. But that was kind of the normal then.
So outside activities, I belonged to the Rainbow Girls and things like that. But not nearly
as much to pick from as there is.
DH:
So as a young teenager, maybe a little bit younger, when you were in elementary school,
can you remember the first time you ever saw an airplane?
BRS: We had airplanes that would fly over Kalispell in the summertime. Kalispell is very
mountainous country and heavy winters, lots of snow. So I only remember very
occasionally growing up, 10, 12, and so forth, when a small airplane would—and we
would all run outside to see it. It would be too high for us to tell much about it. But that
was just something out of this world, you know. It wasn’t anything that—
DH:
There was no airport there at your hometown?
BRS: No, not at that time. There is now, of course. Not at that time.
00:07:56
[College years]
DH:
Yeah. So out of high school, what was next?
BRS: I stayed out of school for a year—out of high school for a year and worked. I worked in a
ladies’ dress shop and saved my money. Two of my best friends were able to go to
college right away. Their families—it’s amazing but not very many girls went to college
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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in those earlier days. And if your family could afford to send you, that was fine. I had a
rather large family with several brothers and sisters. Well, I knew I wanted to go to
college, so I worked and saved my money.
And this is one thing I do like to tell sometimes to people these days. Well, my very first
year, I went to the University of Montana in Missoula because a family who were friends
of ours invited me to come and live with them, stay with them, and go to school. I went
for—I lived at their home. So I had no room or board, but I could afford—we could
afford our tuition. And tuition—I remember these figures very definitely just because we
worked for them, you know, worked to save this. Tuition at the University of Montana
was $35 a quarter in 19—I had stayed out a year, so this was ‘38 now. And room and
board, I didn’t know about—have to pay for that.
So I had a year there. And then the family who I had lived with, he was transferred, so—
he had been with Shell Oil or something—so that meant that I didn’t have a place to stay.
But one of my friends who had gone to college went to University—or went to Montana
State College in Bozeman, and she just thought that I should go to school there. And, of
course, I wanted to go on. And she had been there for a year or two and knew the ropes,
and she told me how to apply. And I got a job with the National Youth Administration,
NYA, at the college. And it paid $18 a month toward my tuition or whatever.
I didn’t tell many people what my job was there. They knew I worked, and I’d just say
“National Youth Administration.” Well, my job was to keep the bathrooms clean in the
dormitory where I was to stay. The dormitory that I stayed in there was—it was new and
a nice place. But, let’s see. It was $45 a month for room and board, which was—you
know, that sounds pretty reasonable now, doesn’t it?
DH:
It does.
BRS: Yeah. And they were on the semester basis there. So that part—I think the semesters
were probably a little more than the quarterly pay. But I had that job, and I liked it there.
It was a very good college, and there were more kids who were kind of—I say “kids”—
kind of in the working class and all. And, well, I just really liked it anyway.
So I went there the following two years, up to my—through my junior year and
majored—we had two choices to be—college majors for women. One was home
economics and that covered—that generally led to a teaching career, but it had other
possibilities. I didn’t really want to be a teacher, I don’t think. I never had a great desire
to be a teacher. But I had to pick a—had to make a choice of what to take. The other
suggestion would have been kind of a business, and that would have been maybe—years
later, I had thought about it, and maybe that would have been a good choice then. But
anyway—
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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DH:
So what did you settle on?
BRS: The home economics.
DH:
Home economics? I see.
BRS: Yeah. And I had that. I was there two years. That was a good—real good college world.
It was a small college. I think that the enrollment at Montana State in the late ‘30s was
about—just under 2,000 students. And that made up the whole college.
But I got a job beside the bathroom job. The next year, I got a better one, and that was
working in a bookstore. A bookstore—was a brand-new bookstore, and it was—the
college was building up all the time, a little bit. And I loved that job, bookstore. And that
paid 25 cents an hour. And the other—so that—I worked quite a bit. I could work nights,
too. I had to get special dispensation to be able to stay out—or to be home to the
dormitory after 10:00, if I had to close down.
DH:
Well, that’s a change from the present experience, isn’t it?
BRS: Yes.
[laughter]
BRS: So that was pretty much my college career. And I made lots of good friends in college
that have lasted through my lifetime, until just more recently, there’s not many.
00:14:08
[Move to Seattle and becoming a United Airlines stewardess]
DH:
Where did life take you next after college?
BRS: Well, let’s see. I was at Bozeman from ‘39, ‘40, ‘41. Those three years. Those two years.
And the other two, I’ve told you about. So I had my senior year. And I was pretty much
set in going on there, although I worked at home in the summertime in my father’s
business in the office at the dairy—the Glacier Dairy office.
Come the fall, and I wasn’t ready to go back to school yet. I can’t quite remember now
why—I was going to take another year off and save some more money, I guess. But that
was October. In 19—in December 7, 1941, this was, of course—you know what
happened then. Well, maybe it was something that led up to that, but I had—the war
started right away, and that involved everybody. And I just forgot about going back to
school then. And I wanted a better job, so I thought, I had friends out here in Seattle. And
my family, knowing I would be with good company—I mean, good place to live and
everything, allowed me to leave home and come out to Seattle and work.
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Well, after the war started, there was just—that changed everybody’s lives. I mean, it
didn’t matter—women had to go to work. They started the factories at Boeing and the
ship-building factories. So I could almost—I applied for work at Boeing. And I almost
could have just done it over the telephone and gotten a job because they needed so—and
my only expertise, so to speak, then was just ordinary typing and filing and bookwork. So
I accepted that job out there, and I had a place to live. And I always think, looking back
on it, that was—I was just in the right place at the right time.
DH:
And this was with Boeing?
BRS: This was with Boeing.
DH:
Whereabouts in Boeing? Was it Boeing Field?
BRS: It was at Boeing Field.
DH:
Was it Boeing Field? Okay.
BRS: Uh-huh [affirmative]. And I was living in the University District with my friends. So it
was a rather long bus ride every day out there to Boeing, but that, you know—you don’t
let a little thing like that stop you. If you have to do it, you have to do it.
So anyway, I was—I liked the job there at Boeing, and I was there—had been there about
two months. And I read in the papers, Seattle Times, that United Airlines was going to
start hiring stewardesses. They had stewardesses at this time, but they were nurses. That
was the whole requirement to be a stewardess then, was a nurse. It wasn’t very well
known. I mean, I didn’t have any friends that were in the airline business or anything. But
I read about that, and it explained how some stewardesses in San Francisco had—how
they lived together and how their flights ran. I thought, oh boy, that sounds like fun.
DH:
Had you ever flown up to this point on an airplane?
BRS: No. No. I’d never even been close to an airplane. I hadn’t even seen the—except in the
sky, and they weren’t exactly very big.
DH:
That’s a pretty intrepid thing for a young woman to do.
BRS: Well, you know, I look back at that and go, “Now how did I have the gumption to make
this decision?” And I went to the interview. Gave a date for an interview, a Saturday
morning. And I went to that, and there’s an article and a picture of that very first
interview. And Seattle being a coastal town, United, of course, went up and down there,
interviewed wherever they had stations. So I went to that, and it sounded—they took
everybody’s name and address, and I had a small interview at that meeting. And there
were maybe 40 girls there. Most of them were from the University, but there were some
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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others. I remember talking to a girl who stood beside me when they took a picture, and
she was a waitress. And so there were all kinds.
We didn’t know the specifications of being a stewardess, but they—I don’t remember
whether they took our—they must have asked us our weight and height. And those were
quite specific because you could—were to be 5’2” to 5’7”, weigh less than 125 pounds.
And I thought, boy, I’m going to have to gain some weight. I don’t weigh enough. I only
weighed 99 pounds or 100. I was real skinny. Anyway, and you had to have had two
years of college. This girl that I mentioned, the waitress next to me, she said, “Oh gosh, I
haven’t been to college.” She was really disappointed. And so that was the end of it.
There was really some nice-looking girls, cute girls from the University there, and some
others. It never occurred to me in the slightest, I just didn’t think, well, I don’t have a
chance for anything like that.
But two weeks later, I got a telegram in—at my apartment, where I was with the friends,
asking me to appear—to come down to San Francisco for a further interview. And they
told me how to go to the United office here in Seattle, get a ticket, pick up my ticket, and
gave me a little more details about it and make a reservation for a flight. Well, I’d
never—I hadn’t even—didn’t even know you had reservations for flights or anything
then.
But I somehow got that done, and now I got to San Francisco, and I was told where to go
for the interview. They told me everything about—except that, well, where are you going
to stay? You’ve got to stay overnight down there. They didn’t mention anything about
where I’d stay or what—how you did that. And I’d never been to a hotel on my own. I’d
never made a reservation. So I inquired around a little bit, and people said, “Well, go to
the YWCA.” And I did. Had to find out what that was all was and where—I didn’t even
know what it was. But I went to the YWCA.
DH:
Let’s back up just a minute now.
BRS: All right.
DH:
I want to hear about what—did you tell your family about all this?
BRS: Not till afterwards.
DH:
Okay.
BRS: Not till after I’d been down there, no.
DH:
And I want to know about your impressions about your first airplane flight from Seattle
to San Francisco.
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BRS: Well, that was my very first—and we went up these stairs, and then we—the first thing I
noticed were the uniforms, and they wore these little hats. I had a hat like that on at the
time, a little kind of pointed hat, just about like this. Because you always wore hats, and
you took—you had gloves, you know. And I thought, oh my goodness, they’re thinking
I’m trying to copy them, I’ll bet, with my hat. Because here their hat was the same as the
one I was wearing. That was my thought.
DH:
So they waited on you? You were actually waited on—as a candidate to become a
stewardess, you were waited on by a stewardess?
BRS: That’s right. And I made—noticed everything she did, too. She smiled a lot. And—
DH:
Did you let her know that you were flying to San Francisco for that reason?
BRS: No. Oh my, no. This was just all beyond me, you know. Born on an Indian Reservation,
and now I’m trying to fly in the sky. Well, anyway—
DH:
So you were at the YWCA?
BRS: And so I had to find direction from there to where I was—the meeting was. And I went to
that. It was—and I remember there were about two people who interviewed you. One
was—gave the more informal questions. Well, I was most impressed by it, of course. I
thought, oh, how great, I think. But I still—it never—I just didn’t ever count on it. I
didn’t think, oh boy, maybe I can do this. But I gave all the information they needed, and
they took your weight and your height and this sort of thing and asked you questions.
Well, when I—then I had a flight home. Well, I still was pretty—I mean, I wasn’t
counting on this at all. I was still amazed by what had happened. Two weeks after I’d
been in San Francisco—and I wasn’t there long enough to see the city or I—you know,
when you’re from a small city, small town, why, how you go about looking around at the
bigger towns and so forth. I didn’t try to take any of that in at the time. But I had my
flight back, went back to work at Boeing.
DH:
So then you told your family what you’d done?
BRS: Well, yes, I told them that I’d done this. And I think they didn’t—well, I’ll tell you one
thing I have forgotten to tell you. I’d never been in an airplane. I’d never been close to
one. But my father, through his dairy business, sent produce and products—butter,
particularly, out to Seattle to the big creameries or dairies out here. And he would have
made orders for several hundred pounds at a time. He would drive trucks out here. And,
of course, that was for overseas ships and our soldiers now. You see, we’re at war.
DH:
Sure.
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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BRS: So he, being in Seattle—he had a sister living in Portland. Well, he would feel that—he’d
always—so close to Portland, but he found out that if he flew to Portland, he could get
down to Portland in an hour and not have to do all, you know, driving of several hours.
So he flew two or three times. He got on the airplane. He must have been quite a bit more
knowledgeable than I was, I guess. But he flew down, and he would come home and talk
about the airplane. This was earlier, before I’d even come. So that was my introduction, I
should say, to flying, probably.
DH:
Was he enthusiastic about it?
BRS: Oh, yeah. Sure. Yeah, he was. But that was my—really the basis—only basis I had for
flying. Well, then when I got this second telegram saying, “We would like—you have
been selected,” I think, or—trying to think how it might have been worded—“…to
become a stewardess, or to attend our first stewardess class.” The first one they were to
have. And it would be in Chicago. Well, I didn’t—my gosh, Chicago’s so far away, you
know.
Anyway, I met—or talked on the phone first and met with them, who gave me more
details about going. So that’s when I really told my folks that I was going to go. And I
think they were really aghast and wanted to say, “Oh, no, we don’t want you flying all the
time,” or something. But they didn’t ever say, “No, you shouldn’t.” They let me make the
decisions and go ahead with my life with—and this is—you know, when you have
children, why, you—it’s pretty hard to let go.
DH:
Oh, yes.
BRS: Pretty hard. Well, the next thing I knew, I was on an airplane for Chicago. The interview
would have been in February, and my date to Chicago was starting April 14th or
something. So it was April that I went back there. And that was just—that was a long
flight back, and I just—I didn’t even tell the stewardess on the airplane what I was—you
know, this is so new to me.
So I was met in Chicago, and the stewardess class was held at the Del Prada Hotel, which
doesn’t mean anything now, but it was South Chicago. And, of course, I’m so wide-eyed
about all this. But there, once I went to the hotel and told them who I was or what I was
there for, why, I was assigned a room, and I met other girls and so forth. So that was—
and that—
DH:
How many other girls were in your class?
BRS: There were 25 in our class from all over the United States.
DH:
And they stayed at the same hotel?
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BRS: All stayed together. And we had a car that picked us up in the morning, took us out to the
airport, to the classrooms. And this was their very first class, and so we were
experimental. I mean, they told us things, and we—or changed their minds along the way
and so forth. Basically, the studies at the school, the classes—the school was to last six
weeks. And so, of course, we learned a lot of United history, their routes and the history.
And I—since I’ve been making a few talks, I’ve remembered things that I didn’t even
think—but they told us in school, one of the things they wanted—or said, “Now, don’t
ever show fright when you’re flying. This is to be—don’t ever show fright.” And, of
course, that just kind of rolls by you. You don’t know what fright on an airplane is yet.
Yet. [laughs] And let’s see, there was one other thing that was surprising that they told
us. Oh, maybe I’ll think of it. But—
DH:
So how long was the curriculum? How long was the course?
BRS: Six weeks.
DH:
Six weeks.
BRS: Six weeks. And, oh, they gave us a good first aid course. Complete first aid, and we got
our first aid—or our Red Cross ticket for that.
DH:
So what was the curriculum like? Now, you had mostly classroom—a good bit in the
classroom?
BRS: Yes.
DH:
Or did you actually practice on an aircraft?
BRS: Uh-huh [affirmative]. Now, while we were in school—and I said there were 25 of us—
and there was a United crash in Denver over the Rocky Mountains. This was 1942 now.
And it really wasn’t too uncommon, those early crashes. I mean, three or four a year, of a
commercial plane. Not just United, of course. But there was Eastern, there was American,
there was Delta, I think, a smaller one. And, of course, United. But the day after this
crash, why, four of the girls didn’t show up for class.
DH:
Oh, dear.
BRS: So I think they’d had calls from their parents that night. “We don’t want you doing this.”
So it came down to 21 in the—and they—of course, we had to learn a good deal of
American history, too. I say “American history.” I mean, wherever United had a station,
why, we had to kind of learn that.
We had to—we learned exactly what we were to do on the airplane, of course. And we
had—after the passengers were all boarded and we had taken off, then we took our
manifest and—that they had given us and had to contact each passenger, get their name,
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get her—make sure that they were who—they knew where we were going, and we would
write down the seat number that they were sitting in. And we were responsible for getting
each passenger at a stop off of the airplane. Some of them, you know, didn’t know you
made only one stop, and so between here and, say, Denver, we’d stop in Boise. Well, we
had to make sure that they got off in Boise, and the others got off in Denver in the same
way.
And that was—but contacting the passengers was interesting. Most of our personnel were
military because they would be on their way back to Washington, D.C., some of them.
Well, I’ve kind of forgotten—skipped a little bit here. When our six weeks was up, why,
we got a nice big certificate, and we were—
DH:
Did they pin wings on you? Was there a pinning ceremony?
BRS: We didn’t have our uniforms yet.
DH:
Oh, you didn’t get your uniforms yet?
BRS: No, we hadn’t had those—but they assigned us—told us where we would be stationed.
And I think with most of them, they gave—if you had a preference, why, then I think
they probably took that into consideration.
DH:
Did you state a preference?
BRS: I don’t think I did. There was no station in Seattle—there was a station here, but they
didn’t have any crews based here. They didn’t base any stewardesses. There was one
other girl from Seattle, besides myself, in this. But she—her family lived here. So I
didn’t—we didn’t plan on living together or anything then. I was assigned Portland. Well,
in so doing, I had relatives there in Portland anyway. So I was—it was just taken for
granted. And I did. I went and lived with my aunt and uncle there—here in Portland.
00:34:00
[Stewardess career]
DH:
So United was flying DC-3s at the time?
BRS: Yes.
DH:
Okay. And do you remember your first flight? The very first flight that you served as a
stewardess and—
BRS: Well, we—the first two or three flights, we went as observers.
DH:
I see.
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BRS: And so observers—yes, I could—I think my first flight all by myself was just Portland to
Seattle.
DH:
But while you were an observer, were you in uniform?
BRS: Oh, yes. Well, yes, we couldn’t fly until we got our uniforms.
DH:
I see.
BRS: And when we got on—the flights were usually full just because it was—but I think they
saved out a seat for when there was an observer. They called us then. And we did that
for—
DH:
So you were flying out of Portland. What were your usual destinations at that time?
BRS: Well, Seattle was an hour’s flight away, and when you went to Seattle, you usually made
two round trips a day on what they called a shuttle flight. There were probably four
flights a day out of Portland, and the other flights would be—one would be going south
to San Francisco, and then there would be girls based in San Francisco. And we’d fly that
far and then layover for a night, and the girls would take it on to Los Angeles, another
crew.
DH:
Now, you were telling me and showing me a picture of Boeing Plant 2 when they
covered it with what appeared to be a village from the air.
BRS: A whole city.
DH:
And you said that one of the first things you had to do was—when you got ready to take
off at Boeing Field, was to make sure that all the window shades were pulled down.
BRS: We had—yes. The shades were pulled down when they boarded the plane, even.
DH:
I see.
BRS: In Seattle. And then after we were, oh, maybe 15 minutes, 20 minutes or—15, maybe—
why, then we could raise the shades. But coming in was the same thing. Any flights in,
you pull the shades. And people—
DH:
Was that your responsibility to make sure that was done as the—
BRS: What?
DH:
Was that your responsibility?
BRS: Oh, we went up through the cabin and pulled them all at a certain—all at the same time.
Then we were given instruction if—nobody was to take pictures at all on the airport
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oryou know, you couldn’t pull the curtain a little aside and have your camera up there
and take—if we found anybody doing that, we were to take their camera, keep it, and turn
it into the station. This was a—now, we didn’t have—that wasn’t very often. I’d see
people peeking once in a while, and then if they continued to do it, why, then—
DH:
Did you get cross with them when they did that? [laughs]
BRS: Oh, not cross. But you’d say, “I’m sorry, that’s not allowed,” or something. And there
was a snap at the—the curtain could—you pulled it back and snapped it at the bottom.
And I think the other one pulled, so they pulled together in the middle. They overlapped
in the middle. So it wasn’t too easy, and most people didn’t do it. But there would always
be one or two. And so you just made a trip up the aisle and—
DH:
So it sounds to me like you settled into this routine pretty quickly after you finished
school?
BRS: Well, oh, yes. Like I say, I was in the right place at the right time. I really thought this
was the—well, for five years, I thought this was the best job I could have ever had.
Because of the timing. This was wartime. And I stayed in Portland for about six or eight
months, and then I transferred to San Francisco. Out of Portland, we also flew east as far
as Salt Lake or Denver, as well as up and down the coast. And then about that time, they
opened a base—started basing—oh, maybe a year or two, after a year, basing
stewardesses here in Seattle.
DH:
Did you fly frequently with the same crew, the same pilot and copilot?
BRS: No. It was always different.
DH:
Always different.
BRS: And you repeated, of course. But even the captains and the copilots didn’t fly as a couple.
Every captain and copilot was a different combination.
DH:
Did you feel—was there any sort of camaraderie between yourself and the pilot and the
copilot, in terms of crew briefings or anything like that?
BRS: Oh, yes. We were always very pleasant. We always walked off the airplane all together
and in uniform, you know. And the pilots were based in different cities than the
stewardesses. At first, anyway. Seattle had pilots based there, but no stewardesses based
there. Not for any particular reason, I don’t think, because in time, why, that probably
changed. And the stewardesses are based in Portland, but no pilots there—based there. So
it was—you got a mix of crews all the time.
DH:
So on the short flight from—for instance, from Portland to Seattle, what type of onboard
amenities do you make available to the passengers? Did you serve coffee?
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BRS: Oh, yes. Now, we had one flight—oh, you’re saying just on this shuttle trip? Yes, we
would always offer coffee. We didn’t serve lunch—or a meal on that because it was only
a little over an hour. And—
DH:
Did your uniform include gloves at that time?
BRS: No.
DH:
It did not.
BRS: No.
DH:
Okay.
BRS: It did with Pan American, but, of course, we weren’t associated with Pan American until
I—
DH:
How did the passengers view the stewardess at that time? Did they—were they
respectful? Did they—
BRS: Oh my, yes. I’ll tell you, it was new to the public to have a stewardess—well, they had
nurses before, and I’m sure they had upmost respect. And when—back in Chicago—this
was the other thing I was going to tell you. They had nurses who were first because
they—oh, and they thought that that would—the public would be more acceptable in
knowing there was help aboard of some kind, you know. When we had our pictures taken
at stewardess school, one of the things was we don’t want smiling pictures. We wanted a
serious picture. And you’ve seen this one picture that was taken at school. It was the
official one. We weren’t smiling. We looked efficient. But they wanted us to pass on the
aspect of being capable and not just too friendly or anything.
DH:
I think that’s the one thing that has persisted throughout the course of the evolution of the
entire profession.
BRS: Yes, maybe so. Uh-huh [affirmative].
DH:
Maybe so. Yeah.
BRS: So now they can have—they have lots of smiling pictures, even back in school, because
people know of the—
DH:
Well, now, I’ve seen pictures of you back in those days when you were in uniform, and
you were pretty easy to look at back then. How often did you get gentlemen asking you
for a little bit of your time?
BRS: Well, I’ll tell you. There was one category above of dating a stewardess, one category
above it, and that would be a movie star. They were, I’m sure, much more in demand. We
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used to have a lot of movie stars on our planes. But I’m saying, in the general public. But
we had a great social life, as much as we wanted. We picked and choose. But how do you
put these things? [laughter]
DH:
Well, that’s pretty much the way it’s always worked, though, Betty, isn’t it?
BRS: Well, I haven’t flown—I haven’t been a stewardess for 70 years now or something.
[laughs] But yes, I think—
00:42:43
[Memorable passengers and flights]
DH:
At some point, I think a young man entered your life, and he must have caught your
fancy, as I understand it.
BRS: Oh my, yes.
DH:
Tell us a little bit about that—
BRS: Well, I’ll tell you, I liked this flying. And I mean, I liked meeting the people. And I had
Eleanor Roosevelt, for instance, used to fly with us fairly often because there was no Air
Force One for those—
DH:
Was she on any of your flights?
BRS: Oh, yes. There was no Air Force One for the First Family—for the President and his
family like there is now. And, of course, President Roosevelt didn’t ever fly with us. But
she did.
DH:
Was there any special instructions when she was on board?
BRS: Yes. She would go to the war bond drives. And you must know what those were.
DH:
Oh, sure.
BRS: Very popular and very important because we financed our wars—we were in two wars at
the same time, and a good deal of that was financed by the war bond drives. And the war
bond drives had important people talking and had lots of movie stars. They liked to get
exposure. And—
DH:
Well, that was certainly a memorable passenger.
BRS: She—
DH:
Are there any others that stand out in your memory as really memorable passengers?
Good or bad?
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BRS: Mostly good. Mostly good. Once in a while—I remember one time here in Seattle when
people were boarding the airplane and I happened to be up front, just coming out of the
cockpit to go back. And all of the sudden, the door went black—I mean, went dark,
where they come in. Like, they shut the door, but shut out the light. It wasn’t that bad, but
it just made a difference. Somebody was blocking the light. And I looked—got back a
little more and [changed?]. It was Joe Louis. And he was so big, he just got—when he got
on the airplane, he just filled up the doorway. [laughter]
DH:
You recognized him instantly then?
BRS: Oh my, yes. And my story about Clark Gable is, of course, one of my favorites. Clark
Gable, who was flying from Seattle to San Francisco one day, and we had left Seattle
about, oh, 11:00, I guess. 10:30, 11:00 in the morning. And we had a full load. We
stopped in Portland briefly. Nobody would get off unless they were assigned to get off.
They didn’t get off just for—and then our next stop was Medford. And, of course, the
DC-3s always made a stop to refuel and so forth. We stopped in Medford and had two
passengers who were getting off there. And I, of course, always checked ahead of time,
and said, “We’ll be in Medford in about 10 minutes,” or something like that.
So this couple was sitting right in the very back seat, and the two of them got off, and
we’d go right on. We didn’t even have to refuel there. So one person got on, and I saw
him walking toward the airplane as he was coming from the terminal. He’d walk out, and
it was just the one. And he looked kind of familiar, and I thought, oh, that’s somebody
I’ve had on the plane before. But I couldn’t tell who he was yet. It was Clark Gable when
he got on. Well, I was surprised, of course. Here’s Clark Gable, number one box office
attraction of any kind, every kind, for the movies. And so he took the one vacant seat—
one of the two vacant ones in the back, next to the window. Well, that left the seat next to
him vacant. Nobody else got on.
So I had just had my little jump seat right behind him. When there’s a vacant seat in the
back, we’re supposed to sit in them, strap on just the same. So I sat next to Clark now.
Clark, you know.
DH:
Did he ask you your name?
BRS: [laughs] I don’t think so. My name is posted up at the front. He didn’t care about that. He
didn’t care. No. But we just chatted away as two people, like you and I. We just talked
and had the best time. I mean, had a very friendly—and so I said, “I’ll bet you’ve been up
here fishing.” Because I knew he—you know, he was in the public all the time. And he
said, “Oh, yes, I was.” He was all alone. And every time he had a chance to get away
from Hollywood, why, he loved to go fishing. And Medford was—so that’s why I—and
so he told me a bit about that.
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But on the same flight, there were two colored people sitting about midway in the
airplane. They were military, I think, as I recall. Yes. But they were—out of Medford was
one of the places that it could get rough, and you could get airsick. Well, and I used to
keep—you could kind of spot people ahead when they were a little bit nervous or
needed—and, of course, we had the burp cups there. And those were the most, I’d say,
friendly thing a stewardess ever had. It was a helpful thing. I didn’t always go along, and
say, “There’s a burp cup down there if you feel sick.” You didn’t say that because then
they’d get the idea that they were supposed to. But you kept an eye out, and most people
who had flew a little bit knew about them. Or, in some cases, I did get them—show them.
Well, these two men used their burp cups. And so I, of course, took care of what was
necessary there and came back and sat down. And Clark Gable was kind of laughing and
smiling. He said, “Good thing you’re not from the south.” I don’t—and I knew exactly
what he meant. And so, I mean, it was just a—oh, I’ll tell you. This was a whole new
world for me of being in a public and realizing that colored people are treated differently.
They had—because as far as I was concerned—we didn’t have any colored people—I
had one in our high school. But as far as I was concerned, I treated them exactly the
same. I gave him the same service and was just as pleasant to them as anybody else
because that’s my nature. I wasn’t—but I had a roommate over the years at one point
who was from Memphis. And, man, she used to tell the dispatchers—didn’t help her, to
tell the dispatchers any—but she’d say, “Don’t put any colored people on my airplane,
because if you do, I’m not going to serve them. I’m not going to—” And she wouldn’t.
She had colored people in her home. We heard great stories about her colored maids and
gardeners and everything. And she was a very pretty girl and—but, boy, she was serious
about this. She flew for a few months, and I guess maybe had some complaints about
how she would—I don’t know what the situation was. But she wouldn’t—yeah.
DH:
Well, I want to talk to you a little bit about how you met your husband.
BRS: Oh, well, that will come. That will take a long time. [laughs] No, it won’t. I’m teasing
you. I will. That will come. But I wanted to finish off something here.
DH:
Go ahead.
BRS: Well, I guess I was talking about the gal from Memphis. And she wouldn’t deviate a
speck on that and serve them. She’d ignore them. And, of course, she didn’t last very
long on the airline. But this whole concept of how colored people were treated. When I
first moved to Seattle, they still had separate bathrooms, and they had—well, there were
other things, too. I’ve kind of forgotten what some of them were now. But that was a
different world.
DH:
Yes.
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BRS: Yeah. And now, of course, we—
DH:
I grew up in much the same environment as you. I had no experience when I grew up in
rural Ohio.
BRS: Yeah.
DH:
And so I really think, in many ways, that led to me being much more broad-minded in
terms of accepting people.
BRS: Well, I think I was going to say that after I had been flying five years, I thought—and I
liked it. But when you get married, you had to quit. I mean, there was no—they didn’t
deviate on that at all.
DH:
Did you keep any kind of a logbook of your flying hours?
BRS: Oh, yes. We had—we kept a logbook of our flight hours.
DH:
Was there a limit to how many hours you could do in a week or a month?
BRS: At first, for stewardesses, they didn’t limit them. Because I know in mine—I have a few
logbooks left—I mean, here—and I’d seen one that said 93 hours for a month. And
maybe—we flew, I’d say, between 80 and 90 hours a month. We flew a lot. But then,
finally, they put through about the time they said you can—in the ‘60s, I think, they
might have changed it, ‘60s or ‘70s, where if you got married, you could fly, still fly.
Well, I flew from ‘42 to ‘47, so none of that pertained to me. But—
DH:
So the husband didn’t come until later?
BRS: He came later.
DH:
Okay, so—but somebody asked me to be sure and ask you about something about
something being sewed inside your uniform?
BRS: Yeah. Now, that’s just one of my stories that I tell sometimes. And like I say, San
Francisco was a—a good place because it was so active, you know. Being on the West
Coast and all the military coming and going. We had generals and admirals and so forth.
You know, they were just the same as anybody else.
I remember one trip that got pretty rough, and there was a Navy general sitting up in
about 2C or something—or up toward the front. And we didn’t have any of the—
overhead storage, where you put things, was open. It didn’t have shutters on it. So when
you got in this rough weather, why, and everybody tried to stay in their seat and all. They
didn’t want to get up and move around. We didn’t want them moving around. The
captains didn’t.
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But things would fly out from overhead. And I remember this one general. It was
lunchtime, and we had served some pea soup or something like that. It was hot. I mean,
and it didn’t—when I had started serving, why, it hadn’t—wasn’t rough, and then when it
did get pretty rough, I quit. But he’d had his service already, and comes an overcoat
down from—flying down from above, right over him and over his tray and everything.
And he’s in a uniform that he didn’t like to get spotted. Well, I spent quite a bit of time
sponging him off afterward, this green pea soup. [laughter] And, of course, sometimes
their hats would fly off. But somebody’s overcoat came and covered him up. There were
just funny things like that all along. We didn’t laugh about that at all.
But one thing I wanted to say is toward the—at the end of the—let’s see, the war was
over in ‘45. In ‘46, the DC-4s came in. I made the proving—had the proving flight on a
DC-4, meaning that’s when all the papers and the editors or the—anybody interested in a
DC-4 would—went along. Engineers and so forth, just for the—to check the flight. I
wasn’t so terribly impressed, although I remember saying—hearing somebody say, “My
heavens, do you realize that we climbed to 10,000 feet in six minutes?” Or something, I
can’t even remember the figures there.
DH:
How many flight attendants were on the DC-4?
BRS: There were two, but I don’t—I guess there must have been somebody else. That day
wasn’t a regular flight, and I think I was the only one on it. It was just to show the
public—or show the commercial world what a DC-4 would do.
DH:
I see.
BRS: It doesn’t—wasn’t so terribly popular, I don’t think. And I don’t recall that it made so
much difference. But the DC-6 came in in 1947, and I had met my husband—he was just
home from his military service. He was a fighter pilot off a carrier down in the South
Pacific. And he—
DH:
Do you remember what unit he flew with, by any chance?
BRS: What, what?
DH:
Do you remember what unit he flew with, by any chance?
BRS: What year he flew?
DH:
What unit? What squadron?
BRS: Oh, gosh, yes. I have all—should know all of that. Well, I’ll think—maybe it’ll come.
DH:
[unintelligible] Okay.
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BRS: He passed away 24 years ago, so I’ve been quite a bit of time since. But he did have two
Medal of Honor commendations with this—first one with—and then the second one—for
his shooting in Leyte Gulf and those battles.
DH:
I see.
BRS: So—
00:57:49
[Courtship, marriage, and service to Hawaii]
DH:
So how did he meet you?
BRS: He got on my airplane.
DH:
I see. Is he in uniform?
BRS: Yes. No, no. This was ‘46, the end of—toward the end of or the middle of ‘46, I guess.
But he had been home a few months. But he was out scouting airlines, I think, to—he
wanted to keep on flying. And so he had been interviewed by TWA and, I don’t know,
maybe one other. But he had been interviewed by Pan American, and he had decided on
Pan American.
DH:
Hm-hmm [affirmative].
BRS: But he hadn’t gone to work for them yet. He was just—he lived here in Seattle. So he was
on his way home and was then—would be going.
DH:
And his name was?
BRS: Ray Stockard. Wallace Raymond Stockard. A very nice-looking man. And, you know,
we used to have lots of—I say “lots.” How do we put this? We had—always had people
asking us if we would go out on dates or have dinner or lunch or something. And
sometimes I got a note later, “Would you meet me—tell me when your next flight to
Seattle is, maybe?”
Well, anyway, I remember thinking later, he inveigled my phone number from me by—
I’m saying “inveigled” just to make it sound that way—because he had asked me if I
knew of any places in San Francisco that might be—he knew—or I guess I’d probably
realized—or talked with him enough to know whether—on this one flight. And I said,
“Well, yes, I do know, because I know a group of stewardesses who have a home in—”
Well, I was one of them, come to think of it. Had a home in—or lived in—near the field.
[unintelligible] I want to say De Soto. It wasn’t that. It’s a small town, South San
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Francisco, right in there. And we were going to move into Burlingame to a nicer and
better apartment. So I did know that that would be available.
So I told him about it, and he said, “Well, could I come and see it sometime?” And I said,
“Well, yes, you could come see it because we’re not the ones you’re going to rent it from.
But you can certainly see it, you know.” And so he asked me for my phone number so he
could call and see when would be acceptable and all this and that. That’s how it kind of
developed.
But I was going to say, after several months and we had been going together, why, I
learned that—oh, well, it was probably about first of January or something, and we were
talking about getting married maybe then. And I thought, well, I’ve been flying for five
years. I better start thinking about giving this up. Because, you know, I could go on and
never get any more interest than I have in him right now.
[production and informal talk while waiting for loud vehicle to pass]
BRS: I think about January, why, Ray and I started thinking about getting married. And he was
working for Pan American now, and those were great flights. But—
DH:
Was he international or—
BRS: Oh, all international.
DH:
All international, okay.
BRS: Yes, he [unintelligible]. So about this same time, United—about January or February,
United made the announcement—and it was news to all of us, the crews—that they were
going to open flights from—start flights from San Francisco to Honolulu. Now, you
know, always before, Matson Airlines—Matson Steamship was the only way people
could get back and forth from—and so that was really big news in the airline industry.
And United was the one who started the very first service. And of course, the people who
flew with United from the East Coast wanted to go [unintelligible].
So that was big news, and I thought to myself, oh gosh, if I don’t see Hawaii now, I’ll
never see Hawaii. You know, once you’re married, you’re grounded, you know. You
don’t—[laughter]. So I kind of talked Ray into—instead of making a wedding date for
maybe May, why, let’s make it a—so I could fly to Honolulu. I knew I had the seniority,
and I would just love to do that. So he already was going back and forth to—his trips
took him all over the Orient. We didn’t goo—they couldn’t go into China at all, but they
went to Hong Kong.
Well, so he was agreeable. And so, sure enough, we started the first of May, United did,
to Hawaii in the DC-6s. It just came out. And now, those were far more impressive—to
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me, anyway—than the 4s. They were bigger. They were better. Everything. They had two
stewardesses on those, and it carried 66 people. So now, I thought, well—and they
wouldn’t—I had passed the training and all, but I knew that I—they wouldn’t—I couldn’t
just fly—take the training and everything and then just fly for a month or so. So I had to
stay three months at least, and I did. But those first flights to Honolulu were more
exciting, I think, than the first ones on the DC-3.
DH:
Were there any special additional training that you had to take to prepare for long
overwater flights?
BRS: Yeah, there was—the same training they have to take right now for overwater. I mean,
we had to be able to swim and do this and get somebody—supposedly, rescue them.
Well, I wasn’t a strong swimmer. Montana waters don’t produce swimmers. [laughter]
01:08:24
[Courier mission]
DH:
So, now tell me about this sewing business in the uniform. I want to know about that.
BRS: Oh, well, you know, we have a lot of military personnel that we knew were important and
all, but we didn’t ever—you don’t usually know details too much. Sometimes we knew
more than we should have, maybe. One night, I went in—or I checked in at dispatch in
San Francisco for a flight to Seattle, and it left San Francisco at 11:00 at night. And so
when I checked in, the dispatch said, “Betty, there’s a couple of gentlemen in the next
room that would like to see you.”
So I went into the next room, and here are two military men. And we had the usual
greetings, and they said, “We’d like to ask a favor of you.” And I said, “Yeah, sure.” And
they said—and then I kind of noticed they were holding a small package. And it was just
ordinary brown-wrapped package, I think. Kind of flat, but nothing bunglesome. And
they said, “We would like you to deliver this package for us in Seattle now.” So I started
to open my purse to put it in, and they said, “Oh, no. It can’t go in your purse. This has
got to go inside your jacket blouse. And we’re going to pin it there.” They didn’t sew it
up, but they pinned it, I guess, [unintelligible].
And they said, “You’re not to—” No, and then I said, “Yes, that’s fine. I can do that,
carry it there. Do you want me to give this to dispatch in Seattle?” And they said, “No,
no. We’ve already talked to the pilots, and they’re going to—when you land there,
they’re going to taxi to the far end of the runway.” I mean, from where we landed, turn
around and taxi back to the far end someplace. And, of course, it’s dark. Nobody knew
where we were anyway, but—nobody except me. And they said, “We’ll have a military
jeep down there, and they will come up, and they will open the cockpit door.” The DC-3
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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door could only be opened from the outside. So they said, “They will open the door. Then
you can unfasten that and hand them the package.” And they said—made the statement,
“You’re not to touch it or handle it or anything—or open it in any way at all or let
anybody else know it’s there,” you know.
So everything went per schedule. And they opened the door down there. We taxied back,
and they opened the door. There was two military men there, jeep off in the dark, I guess.
And so I got it loose, handed it to them. Everything went just as scheduled. I never knew
what it was, who it was for, who it was from. About this same time, General Wainwright,
who had been a prisoner of war in the Philippines—[unintelligible]. And I know that he
and his men had been released. Now, I can’t just remember now what the time—what the
frame of time was for his release or when this happened.
DH:
It would have been ‘45.
BRS: Yeah, it was ‘40—it was—yeah. So I never knew anymore about it than that.
DH:
I think you contributed to the war effort.
BRS: Well, I think I was a courier for something important, but I never did know.
DH:
That’s very interesting.
BRS: Well, it was, and it’s the first time that anything was—I think they wanted to get it up
here in a hurry. And they had their own couriers, military couriers, all the time, I know.
But apparently, why, this was going to get here faster, right that same night, than
anything else.
01:13:02
[Flight with former prisoners of war]
DH:
I’m going to challenge you a little bit.
BRS: All right.
DH:
I’m going to ask you if you can tell me about your most memorable flight as a
stewardess.
BRS: Oh my. No, I’d have to give that a lot of thought, I think. I like—I mean, things like this
and other people that we met, one flight—I mean, there’s nothing memorable about this
particularly, except one flight—and this was about the same period, at the end of the war,
when the prisoners—those who had been held prisoner—this could have even been
General Wainwright’s same time. I don’t know. Don’t remember now. But they told me
ahead of time that they were going to be all disabled, and people who had been prisoners
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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of war were going to be on the flight. We were going to have a full load of that. So that
was fine, you know.
And they got on the airplane, and they were in sad shape. I mean, you—it just—they
were still malnourished, and there were some without limbs. There was one man that had
an old ax handle—it appeared to be an ax handle—attached to just below his knee that
came hobbling on with that. And there was a couple that were blind. So that was—it was
a different—gave you a different perspective and attitude, of course.
They didn’t—I thought they would all be joyful. They were going home. They had been
released, and once they were released from prison, they were sent to Tripler Hospital in
Honolulu. And they had been there for a good two weeks, probably, so that they could fly
again. They’d had nourishment and things so they’d be able to fly, I should say. And the
government or whoever, the military, decided the very best thing that they could do
would be to go home for a couple weeks. They’d had no contact. Go to their own homes.
So these men were all from Oregon, Washington, Montana, and I remember there were
two from British Columbia.
Well, so I just tried to—I thought they would be just so happy, you know, to be on an
airplane going home. And I’m sure they were within. But they’d been prisoners so long,
they didn’t talk to each other. They didn’t converse. They were pleasant, of course,
appreciative of when I served a meal or something. But it was just an attitude that, well,
you never—you could see that they had been through very, very hard times. So that is
one flight I’ve always kind of remembered.
01:16:10
[In-flight emergency involving a Boeing B-17 aircraft]
DH:
Did you ever have any in-flight emergencies or aircraft malfunctions that got you just a
little bit excited?
BRS: Yes. And that was a B-17 flying out of Salt Lake City at the military airport there. And
we were just coming in to Salt Lake. And it’s a kind of a narrow passage, where we were.
I can’t remember too much about it. But we started in, and all of the sudden, the captain
just dove. I mean, the airplane just dove. We were still high enough that he could. I hit
the ceiling. But I hit the ceiling two or three times, I mean. But this one, I hit—I probably
came down straddle a seat or something. And it was just that this Boeing B-17 came out
just—and we were just so—could have hit each other so well.
And I remember that we stopped—as soon as we got to the airport, the captain opened
the door, he came storming through the cabin, and I don’t know how he got out of the
airplane, but he did. I mean, it only opened on the outside—that might have been a 6. But
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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to get into them—nobody had notified him of this, the military hadn’t. He was trying to
avert some other disaster because it was—he really saved the airplane that day. Well, you
know, I don’t think—there’s sometimes—sometimes there were situations that I
wondered about, but—I mean, that might have been close calls, too. But you didn’t—
01:18:05
[Flying a Douglas DC-3 aircraft]
DH:
So you crewed on DC-3s, DC-4s, and DC-6s.
BRS: Yes.
DH:
Which was your favorite?
BRS: Well, you know, I liked the DC-6 a lot, but I wasn’t there very long. And I just thought,
you know, it’s time I quit—I’d better—I’d rather get married now and start a new career.
So I didn’t—I liked that one. But then, of course, the DC-3 was just like my right hand,
kind of.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Was that the one you flew?
BRS: That’s—oh, the one I flew? Oh, yes. I flew the DC-3 once.
DH:
Oh, tell us about that.
BRS: Well, this was a night flight again. Let me just reckon where we were flying. We were
flying, I think, to—let’s see. Nighttime. Anyway, I think we were flying to Denver,
maybe. Although most of our flights to Denver—the only flights at night usually were up
and down the coast. Well, anyway, let me think now. Just a minute. Yeah, this was a
flight from San Francisco, which we boarded at 11:00, and going—coming north. And—
yeah, that was—that’s the one. Okay.
We always, when they got on—people got on and we took off at 11:00, the first thing we
did was serve them hot chocolate and cookies, usually. They liked that. And so that took
a half an hour or so. And then by that time, why, they were ready to—I gave them all
blankets and pillows and turned down the lights when it got late enough. So it was very
quiet. And it was not completely dark in the cabin, but very little light. And most all of
them were asleep. So I took the coffee—or the—yeah, coffee or hot chocolate or
whatever they wanted and the cookies up to the crew. And the cockpit door—that was
always locked. The stewardess had a key for that all the time.
And so I got that door open. And the passageway in the DC-3 is short and narrow. The
heating system is from right behind the captain’s seat to the back quite a bit. Anyway,
why, I kind of squeezed by the copilot because he was working, doing something there in
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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the passageway. And when I got up, the captain said, “We’re having a problem with our
heating system.” And I said, “Well, yes, I know you are.” Because it was cool back in the
cabin, you know, for the flight. So he had his coffee or whatever it was, and about this
time, the copilot said, “Captain, you’re going to have to come back here and help me.
One person can’t do this alone.” Well, the captain said, “Okay. Betty, sit down here in
my seat.” [laughs] Betty, sit in my seat. And I did. He said, “Now, I’m going to tell you
what to do, and you just do that and I’ll go back. I’ll step back there and help.”
So he told me about—I held the wheel. He said, “Hold it very firmly, and don’t—”
Because it’ll start rolling, you know, how it can dip. And that’s so easy for it to do. So he
told me exactly what to do, and then he said, “Now, that’s Mount Shasta.” Well, I knew
that was Mount Shasta ahead. I’d been by it a few times. [laughter] But this was a bright
moonlight night, and it was snow-covered. And so that wasn’t hard. I kept the nose right
on Mount Shasta. But it was a little—took a little more time. And so he went back and
helped the copilot with the heating system. And I could hear them cussing, both of them,
back there a little bit, every once in a while. But I was very intent. So I flew the airplane
for about—and just once did he turn and have to come back a little bit. But he just—you
know, he would feel any motion if I dip it, but I didn’t too much. And he said, “Oh, that’s
fine.”
I must have flown it for about 30 minutes, I think. Really. Really, 30 minutes. And
they—like I say, they were fussing with that thing. And the light wasn’t very good and—
DH:
Did you put that in your logbook, young lady?
BRS: Well, I’ll tell you. No, I was—I wouldn’t put that and let anybody know. You know,
really and truly, I knew that if you tell somebody something and only they don’t—you
don’t want them—or, I mean—they wanted a secret. Not a secret, but just don’t want
them to know it.
DH:
Did the captain swear you to secrecy?
BRS: No, no, he didn’t. I thought, boy, I want to keep my job, though. I’m not going to
mention this to anybody. [laughter] I didn’t even tell my roommates about this incident
because—for several months, maybe, because—well, I wouldn’t have wanted the captain
to—the captain shouldn’t get fired. And they might have fired me, but I don’t know.
DH:
I think the statute of limitations has run out on that, so I think you’re okay.
BRS: Well, that’s what I said in my last speech. I said, “Okay, now I’ve told you this story.
And so you can tell somebody now if you want.” But then, I wouldn’t tell anybody about
it.
01:24:32
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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[Retirement and family life]
DH:
So you met Ray.
BRS: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
DH:
And when you hung up your uniform for the last time, did you have any regrets?
BRS: Oh my, it was hard. Yes. Yes. You see, but I thought—well, I had a whole new career
ahead of me that I was looking forward to. And I had already asked him, you know, to
delay the wedding for two or three months. And then, of course, after I’d been a Pan
American wife for a while, I find out, my heavens, I can fly all over the world with Pan
American now. And before, here I was thinking of just having a—
DH:
Were you pretty critical of the Pan Am stewardesses on their flights? Did you watch their
performance?
BRS: I usually didn’t ever mention—some of them knew it anyway. No, I never have. I’ve
never even mentioned it—I mean, I don’t mention it now, if I were to fly off to
someplace. I don’t say, “I used to do that.” No. I think that my time—I think I was at the
right—in the right place at the right time. It was such an interesting—during the war, you
know, all these things that went on. I was in San Francisco where it—so much happened
and kept up with it all.
DH:
So you had a family. And what were your children’s names?
BRS: Well, I had four children. And that’s why those things are kind of ragged. I think I must
let them look at it sometimes. [referring to something off camera] Well, my children were
all pretty close together. I mean, they were—the first two were 21 months apart, a boy
and a girl. That’s fine.
DH:
And their names were…?
BRS: Joe, named after my father. His father’s name had been Valjean, but he had been
named—or was supposed to have been Joseph, like his father. So carrying it down
through the family. So I had a Joseph William. And William was Ray’s best friend’s
name. Then my second child was Denise, a girl. And Denise Elizabeth. Then came
Edward. [addressing someone else] Whatever happened to Edward? Where is he?
UP:
They took off to do errands.
BRS: Oh, they went off. Oh well. Okay. [unintelligible]
UP:
So you can say what you want.
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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BRS: Edward. And then Richard. Dick. Dick. And the last two were 21 months apart, and then
there was three years. And so they grew up pretty close together, you know, family.
When I think—one advantage to my being a stewardess, I think, was that I let the kids at
a fairly—after their teens—after they were out of high school, I let them—we let them
take trips. They took trips with us, but by that time, they got to take them on their own,
providing they met with our—my husband was very, very—what’s the word I want? He
wanted them to be dressed neatly. No sandals. You wear socks if you’re going to wear
sandals. He wasn’t going to have somebody point to him, and say, “That’s a Stockard
kid. That’s one of his.” He wanted them to be presentable, always, and everything they
did on the airplanes when they were by themselves.
So they have—one boy went—spent three years in Borneo with the Peace Corps. He had
a high military number, so he wasn’t—my daughter went to school in Germany and had
some trips around it. Ed—what did Ed do? Ed did things. They all got to make trips. Ed
went and saw a bicycle that he liked advertised—we lived in Miami. We got moved all
over.
DH:
I’m sure.
BRS: And Ed said, “I want to go to England and get that bicycle.” So we let him do these
things, as they were adults, and consequent—and Dick—and they all graduated from
college.
DH:
That’s wonderful.
BRS: I’m proud of that for them. They’ve been good citizens.
01:29:20
[Advice for future generations]
DH:
Well, one last question.
BRS: All right.
DH:
And you know that we’re—our mission statement at The Museum of Flight is to be the
foremost educational air and space museum in the world.
BRS: Good.
DH:
We hang a lot of credit on that. If you have a message that you would like to convey to
young women who might be considering some career in aviation or aerospace, what
would you tell them?
2014 © The Museum of Flight
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BRS: If they’re already considering this, if they have an interest, if they’re—even though it
takes ambition or delay a little bit, if they’ve got the interest, let them go—they should go
ahead and do it. That’s all I can—that isn’t anything profound, you know. Most of them
would do it nowadays. Nowadays, they have such a variety of opportunities. And I have
looked back and thought, I wonder how I ever had the guts to even go to an interview in
Seattle when I come from an Indian Reservation. I was very shy.
DH:
I think you did very well.
BRS: Well, I’m—I don’t like to make it sound like I’ve done well. I don’t mean that. Because
I’ve been very fortunate. Ray and I had a good marriage, and we were glad we got our
kids educated. And he, of course, hasn’t even met [Tari?], Ed’s wife, or his grandchildren
or great-grandchildren or anything, which is too bad. He died of cancer, of bone cancer.
DH:
I think that’s a wrap. Anything else you can think of?
BRS: Boy, how have you stood up through all this?
PEDER NELSON:
Oh, that was great.
BRS: Oh no. [laughs]
PN:
It was great.
DH:
Betty, thank you very much. This is wonderful. This is exactly what we hoped for.
BRS: Well, all right.
01:31:26
[END OF INTERVIEW]
2014 © The Museum of Flight
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Museum of Flight Oral History Collection
Description
An account of the resource
<p>The <strong>Museum of Flight Oral History Collection</strong> chronicles the personal stories of individuals in the fields of aviation and aerospace, from pilots and engineers to executives. This collection, which dates from 2013 to present, consists of digital video recordings and transcripts, which illustrate these individuals’ experiences, relationship with aviation, and advice for those interested in the field. By the end of 2019, approximately 76 interviews will have had been conducted. The interviews range in length from approximately 20 minutes to 4 hours and 45 minutes. Most interviews are completed in one session, but some participants were interviewed over multiple occasions.</p>
<p>The personal stories in this collection span much of the modern history of flight, from the Golden Age of Aviation in the 1930s, to the evolution of jet aircraft in the mid-twentieth century, to the ongoing developments of the Space Age. The selected interviewees represent a wide range of career paths and a diverse cross-section of professionals, each of whom made significant contributions to their field. Among the many interviewees are Calvin Kam, a United States Army veteran who served as a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War; Robert “Bob” Alexander, a mechanical engineer who helped design the Hubble Telescope; and Betty Riley Stockard, a flight attendant during the 1940s who once acted as a secret parcel carrier during World War II.</p>
<p>The production of the videos was funded by Mary Kay and Michael Hallman. Processing and cataloging of the videos was made possible by a 4Culture "Heritage Projects" grant.</p>
<p>Please note that materials on TMOF: Digital Collections are presented as historical objects and are unaltered and uncensored. See our <a href="https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/disclaimers-policies">Disclaimers and Policies</a> page for more information.</p>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2013-current
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Museum of Flight (Seattle, Wash.)
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
oral histories (literary works)
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://archives.museumofflight.org/repositories/2/resources/6">Guide to the Museum of Flight Oral History Collection</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights Holder
A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource.
The Museum of Flight Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Permission to publish material from the Museum of Flight Oral History Collection must be obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
Bibliographic Citation
A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible.
The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection/The Museum of Flight
Identifier
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2019-00-00.100
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Stockard, Betty Riley, 1919-
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Hagedorn, Dan
Biographical Text
<p>Betty Stockard was among the first specially trained flight attendants and attended a number of celebrities during her time as a flight attendant for United Airlines. She also worked for the Boeing Company.</p>
<p>Elizabeth “Betty” Jean Riley Stockard was born on May 16, 1919, in Kalispell, Montana to Valjean Riley and Charlotte Dryer. She graduated high school from Flathead County High School, which is on an Indian Reservation. Her family made their living as farmers, selling dairy products such as butter and milk. Growing up on a dairy farm, Stockard says her favorite food was ice cream due to it being in abundance on the farm.</p>
<p>After graduating from high school, Stockard knew she wanted to attend college, so she saved up money working at a women’s dress shop and stayed with a family friend while attending the University of Montana in Missoula. There were only two major options for women at that time at this university: home economics and business. Stockard decided on home economics but took a break before her senior year due to the United States’ involvement in World War II.</p>
<p>In 1942 Stockard began working for the Boeing Company at Boeing Field in Washington before seeing a United Airlines job posting regarding “stewardess” (flight attendant) positions. Following this, Stockard began the lengthy interview and training process before becoming a flight attendant. She was among the first women to be specially trained to become flight attendants, as all previous flight attendants had been nurses. During this process, Stockard took her first airplane flight from Seattle, Washington to San Francisco, California.</p>
<p>During her time as a flight attendant, Stockard had interactions with a number of celebrities and famous figures, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Stockard also met her husband, Wallace Raymond Stockard, on a flight she was attending. Stockard also had lengthy experience flying in the Douglas DC-4 airplane that came into use during World War II.</p>
<p>After being a flight attendant, Stockard married Wallace Stockard and had four children, three boys and one girl. By 1950, their family was living in San Mateo, California but later returned to the Seattle area. Wallace died in 1990 in Seattle; Betty was still living in the area as of 2014.</p>
<p>Biographical information derived from interview and additional information provided by interviewee.</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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OH_Stockard_Betty
OH_Stockard_Betty_transcription
Title
A name given to the resource
Betty Riley Stockard oral history interview
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection (2019-00-00-100), Digital Recordings
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Museum of Flight (Seattle, Wash.)
Description
An account of the resource
Born-digital video recording of an oral history with Betty Riley Stockard and interviewer Dan Hagedorn, recorded as part of The Museum of Flight Oral History Program, March 19, 2014.
Abstract
A summary of the resource.
Retired stewardess Betty R. Stockard is interviewed about her career with United Airlines. She discusses her experiences in the airline industry during the 1940s, such as the interview and training process, memorable encounters with passengers, and her flights along the West Coast and to Hawaii. She also recounts a story in which she served as a wartime courier for an important package. Other topics discussed include her childhood and college years in Montana; her thoughts on the Douglas DC-3, DC-4, and DC-6 aircraft; and her life after retiring from United Airlines.
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Introduction and personal background -- College years -- Move to Seattle and becoming a United Airlines stewardess -- Stewardess career -- Memorable passengers and flights -- Courtship, marriage, and service to Hawaii -- Courier mission -- Flight with former prisoners of war -- In-flight emergency involving a Boeing B-17 aircraft -- Flying a Douglas DC-3 aircraft -- Retirement and family life -- Advice for future generations
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2014-03-19
Subject
The topic of the resource
Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress Family
Boeing Company
Douglas DC-3 Family
Douglas DC-4 Family
Douglas DC-6 Family
Flight attendants
King County International Airport
Prisoners of war
Stockard, Betty Riley, 1919-
United Airlines
World War, 1939-1945
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
California
Chicago (Ill.)
Hawaii
Illinois
Montana
Oregon
Portland (Or.)
San Francisco (Calif.)
Seattle (Wash.)
United States
Washington (State)
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
1 recording (1 hr., 31 min., 26 sec.) : digital
Language
A language of the resource
English
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
oral histories (literary works)
born digital
Bibliographic Citation
A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible.
The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection/The Museum of Flight
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
-
https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/files/original/ed22148489450d458011dcb0d2984ff6.JPG
70ebe3efc4d32676fa58fe76dcf62ed4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Peter A. Klover World War I Collection
Description
An account of the resource
<p>The <strong>Peter A. Klover World War I Collection</strong> is a small collection consisting of documents and photographs from approximately 1917-1935 related to Klover's service in World War I as an aviation mechanic in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.</p>
<p>The documents in the collection include an undated clipping from later in his life detailing his military service and post-war work; an undated form from the U.S. Civil Service Commission for temporary appointment, transfer, reinstatement, or promotion; and a handwritten document explaining his military and work experience from 1917 to about 1934, possibly an addendum to the previous form.</p>
<p>There are ten black-and-white photographs in the collection. A panoramic group portrait depicts an unidentified military squadron, though probably from the Signal Corps. Peter Klover's brother, Nicholas Cornelius Klover, is pictured in this group in the 2nd row, seventh from left, seated. This image was possibly taken at Kelly Field, Texas. An 8x10" image depicts an American Multiplane Company's John's Multiplane, likely at Langley Field, Hampton Virginia in 1919, with a Thomas-Morse Scout in the background. Two 8x10" aerial views show the Fairfield Air Intermediate Depot in what was then Fairfield, Ohio (the area was renamed Fairborn in 1950) with numerous pursuit planes lined up. One of these aerials is dated 1931. A black album page includes six snapshots, four of which are personal in nature. One of the images is captioned, "planes on line, victory liberty loan, Chicago," and depicts Curtiss Jennies (including JN-4Hs) at Grant Park. The last photo is captioned, "captured German Fokker 'V' L.L. Chicago May 1919" and depicts two men on a Fokker D.VII with lozenge camouflage.</p>
<p>Though Klover worked closely with dirigibles during World War I, there are no materials related to dirigibles in the collection.</p>
<p><strong>Digitized Materials:</strong> Items related specifically to aviation have been digitized from this collection.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Klover, Peter A., 1896-1969
Source
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<a href="https://archives.museumofflight.org/repositories/2/resources/508">Guide to the Peter A. Klover World War I Collection</a>
Language
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All materials are in English.
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The Museum of Flight Archives
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Permission to publish material from the Peter A. Klover World War I Collection must be obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
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The Peter A. Klover World War I Collection/The Museum of Flight
Identifier
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2019-04-04-A
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
circa 1917-1935
Still Image
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Title
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[Four Curtiss JN-4 Jenny aircraft at Grant Park]
Source
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The Peter A. Klover World War I Collection (2019-04-04-A), Folder 1
Description
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<p>Photograph of four Curtiss JN-4 Jenny aircraft at Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois, circa 1910s-1920s.</p><p>Inscription: "Planes on line / Victory Liberty Loan / Chicago."</p>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1910s-1920s circa
Subject
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Curtiss JN-4 Jenny Family
United States. Army
Airplanes, Military
Coverage
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Chicago (Ill.)
Illinois
United States
Extent
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1 photograph: print, black and white ; 17 x 12 cm
Language
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English
Format
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photographic prints
Bibliographic Citation
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The Peter A. Klover World War I Collection/The Museum of Flight
Rights
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Copyright undetermined
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2019-04-04-A_image_005_01
-
https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/files/original/e9a9e989eed154430a7c98a1c68fe8cf.JPG
a6c32e69b5b857709ab9a49b96779255
Dublin Core
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Title
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Peter A. Klover World War I Collection
Description
An account of the resource
<p>The <strong>Peter A. Klover World War I Collection</strong> is a small collection consisting of documents and photographs from approximately 1917-1935 related to Klover's service in World War I as an aviation mechanic in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.</p>
<p>The documents in the collection include an undated clipping from later in his life detailing his military service and post-war work; an undated form from the U.S. Civil Service Commission for temporary appointment, transfer, reinstatement, or promotion; and a handwritten document explaining his military and work experience from 1917 to about 1934, possibly an addendum to the previous form.</p>
<p>There are ten black-and-white photographs in the collection. A panoramic group portrait depicts an unidentified military squadron, though probably from the Signal Corps. Peter Klover's brother, Nicholas Cornelius Klover, is pictured in this group in the 2nd row, seventh from left, seated. This image was possibly taken at Kelly Field, Texas. An 8x10" image depicts an American Multiplane Company's John's Multiplane, likely at Langley Field, Hampton Virginia in 1919, with a Thomas-Morse Scout in the background. Two 8x10" aerial views show the Fairfield Air Intermediate Depot in what was then Fairfield, Ohio (the area was renamed Fairborn in 1950) with numerous pursuit planes lined up. One of these aerials is dated 1931. A black album page includes six snapshots, four of which are personal in nature. One of the images is captioned, "planes on line, victory liberty loan, Chicago," and depicts Curtiss Jennies (including JN-4Hs) at Grant Park. The last photo is captioned, "captured German Fokker 'V' L.L. Chicago May 1919" and depicts two men on a Fokker D.VII with lozenge camouflage.</p>
<p>Though Klover worked closely with dirigibles during World War I, there are no materials related to dirigibles in the collection.</p>
<p><strong>Digitized Materials:</strong> Items related specifically to aviation have been digitized from this collection.</p>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Klover, Peter A., 1896-1969
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://archives.museumofflight.org/repositories/2/resources/508">Guide to the Peter A. Klover World War I Collection</a>
Language
A language of the resource
All materials are in English.
Rights Holder
A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource.
The Museum of Flight Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Permission to publish material from the Peter A. Klover World War I Collection must be obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
Bibliographic Citation
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The Peter A. Klover World War I Collection/The Museum of Flight
Identifier
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2019-04-04-A
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
circa 1917-1935
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
[American servicemen with captured German Fokker D.VII aircraft]
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Peter A. Klover World War I Collection (2019-04-04-A), Folder 1
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Photograph of two American servicemen with a captured German Fokker D.VII aircraft, Chicago, Illinois, circa 1919.</p><p>Inscription on album page: "Captured German Fokker / VII / Chicago: 1919."</p>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1919 circa
Subject
The topic of the resource
Fokker D.VII (V.18)
United States. Army
Airplanes, Military
Soldiers
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Chicago (Ill.)
Illinois
United States
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
1 photograph: print, black and white ; 14 x 12 cm
Language
A language of the resource
English
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
photographic prints
Bibliographic Citation
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The Peter A. Klover World War I Collection/The Museum of Flight
Rights
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No copyright - United States
Identifier
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2019-04-04-A_image_004_01
-
https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/files/original/bc46a49fc2d02b3f68b4c57b98338a78.mp4
89e90f92731d696fc32c714e4a7a017a
https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/files/original/fed7196b1162e38f780d82bff4eb0402.pdf
dcecc729a911a7447c8843aa3132b91b
PDF Text
Text
The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection
The Museum of Flight
Seattle, Washington
Joseph Kimm
Interviewed by: Dan Hagedorn
Date: May 31, 2013
Location: Redmond, Washington
This interview was made possible with generous support from
Mary Kay and Michael Hallman
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�2
Abstract:
Pilot Joseph E. Kimm is interviewed about his decade-spanning aviation career. He discusses his
early experiences as a flight steward on Ford Trimotor aircraft, and his time as a copilot and pilot
for Northwest Airways (later Northwest Airlines), spanning the 1930s to the 1970s. He also
touches on his military service during World War II with Air Transport Command, U.S. Army
Air Corps. Other topics discussed include his work building aircraft models, his experiences with
various aircraft, and a memorable flight from Minneapolis to Seattle with Amelia Earhart.
Biography:
Joseph Kimm had a 42-year long career with Northwest Airways and served with the Special
Missions Group during World War II.
Joseph Edward Kimm was born August 18, 1911 in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Albert Peter and
Catherine Kimm. He attended Central High School in Minneapolis, graduating in 1929. Because
of the Depression, his family could not afford to send him to college, so he found a job helping
make candy at a soda fountain.
As a child he enjoyed building model airplanes. At a meeting for model airplane makers he met
Walter Bullock, an early aviator who shared Kimm’s hobby. When Kimm quit his job at the soda
fountain, Bullock hired him to help make and sell model airplane kits. Bullock also flew for
Northwest Airlines and invited Kimm on a flight. Having enjoyed the flight, Kimm then asked
Bullock to help him get a job as a flight steward. Kimm was hired by Northwest Airways July 1,
1929 to serve as steward on the then-new Ford Trimotors. His primary task was to keep the
airplane cabin clean. Kimm claims to have invented the air sickness bag while he was working as
a steward. Realizing that being a pilot would be more a lucrative job, he sought out flight
training. He began working for Northwest as co-pilot, and once he had earned his commercial
pilot’s license he was promoted to captain in 1933 at the age of 23. His first route was between
Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota.
Over the course of his piloting career, he was involved in opening up two important air routes,
one from Minneapolis to Seattle, Washington across the northern Rockies. That flight had
Amelia Earhart as a passenger, who was publicizing both her recent book and their historymaking flight. He also opened a route across previously uncharted territory from Edmonton,
Alberta, Canada to Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska.
Fascination with the P-12E motivated him to join the Army Air Corps Reserves prior to the U.S.
entry into World War II. This later led to him being called into wartime active duty in 1941 as
one of the few dozen pilots forming the Special Missions Group (Brass Hat Squadron) during the
2013 © The Museum of Flight
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war. In this role, he flew various dignitaries around the world, including Senator Albert Hawkes,
Mexican Air Force General Salinas, and then General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In October 1956, Kimm and Senior Captain “Deke” DeLong marked Northwest’s 30th
Anniversary by flying a restored Ford Trimotor coast to coast to mark the occasion. Treated like
celebrities at every stop, Kimm and DeLong appeared on the Arthur Godfrey Show in New
York.
Kimm flew his final Northwest Boeing 707 flight on August 17, 1971. In his retirement years he
enjoyed skiing, scuba diving, and delivering Meals on Wheels until he was well into his 90s.
Kimm lived to be 102 years old, passing away on September 19, 2013.
Biographical information derived from interview and additional information provided by
interviewee.
Interviewer:
Dan Hagedorn served as Senior Curator and Director of Collections at The Museum of Flight
from 2008 until his retirement in 2016. Prior to his tenure at TMOF, he was Adjunct Curator and
Research Team Leader at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Hagedorn is
a graduate of Villa Maria College, the State University of New York, and the Command and
General Staff College, and served in the U.S. Armed Forces for almost three decades. He has
written numerous books and articles about aviation history in general and Latin American
aviation in particular. For his work in documenting Latin American aviation history, he received
the Orden Merito Santos-Dumont from the Brazilian Government in 2006. Since his retirement
in 2016, Hagedorn has served as a Curator Emeritus at the Museum.
Restrictions:
Permission to publish material from The Museum of Flight Oral History Program must be
obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
Videography:
Videography by TMOF volunteers and staff.
Transcript:
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�4
Transcribed and reviewed by TMOF volunteers and staff.
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�5
Index:
Introduction and personal background............................................................................................ 6
Early aviation memories ................................................................................................................. 7
Experiences with model airplanes .................................................................................................. 9
Job as an ice cream and candy maker ........................................................................................... 11
Working with Walter Bullock and job as a flight steward............................................................ 12
Becoming a pilot ........................................................................................................................... 15
Flight from Minneapolis to Seattle in 1933 .................................................................................. 17
Involvement with the Air Line Pilots Association and Quiet Birdmen ........................................ 19
Service with the U.S. Army Air Corps ......................................................................................... 20
Postwar flying career and retirement ............................................................................................ 22
Final questions .............................................................................................................................. 24
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�6
Joseph Kimm
[START OF INTERVIEW]
00:00:00
[Introduction and personal background]
DAN HAGEDORN: We’re in the home of Captain Joe Kimm in Redmond, Washington.
Today’s date is Friday, May the 31st, 2013. Captain Kimm, it is our honor and our
pleasure to be with you here today. Will you please say your full name for us?
JOSEPH KIMM:
My name is Joseph Edward Kimm. K-I-M-M.
DH:
Very good, sir. And when were you born?
JK:
I was born August 18th, 1911
DH:
And you were born where?
JK:
In Minneapolis, Minnesota.
DH:
Oh, very good. You’re a Midwesterner, very good. Where did you grow up? Did you
grow up in Minneapolis, in that area [unintelligible]?
JK:
Yeah, I grew up in Minneapolis. I was a rather shy kid, you know, four or five years old,
afraid of my own shadow. [laughs] And it was interesting because—and it was really
because of that shyness that I ended up doing what I did. I remember growing up, my
brother and I would be—why, say I was five years old and he would be six. This brother
was fifteen months older than me. And we were pals together as children. My mother
would put us out in the backyard with a rope around our ankles and then run off and leave
us.
Herb was very [intelligent?]. He was very capable of untying knots, whereas I could not
have untied a knot if my life depended on it. Herb would untie his knot and would start
running out of the yard, and I would holler at him, “You got to come and untie mine or
I’ll call Mother.” [laughs]
DH:
Was this your only brother?
JK:
Oh, no, I had an older brother. But we were just fifteen months apart.
DH:
And your brother’s names were what, again?
JK:
This brother I’m speaking of was Herb.
DH:
Herb.
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�7
JK:
Herbert.
DH:
Herbert. Uh-huh [affirmative].
JK:
We called him Herb. My oldest brother was Gervaise.
DH:
And what were your parents’ names?
JK:
My mother’s name was Catherine.
DH:
Catherine.
JK:
My father’s name was Albert. Albert Peter.
DH:
Very good.
JK:
[coughs] Well, I remember one occasion where mother ran off and left us tied, and so I
hollered and Joe had to—Herb had to come back and let me loose. We untied the knots,
and we went off on a wonderful trip around town. They had just tarred the surfaces of the
road, and we got out there in our bare feet and walking up and down those tarred roads,
and we were in seventh heaven. It was just—my memory of it is just a glorious morning.
And, of course, we got all full of tar. And when Mother found us, she was so upset.
DH:
I’ll bet she was.
JK:
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
DH:
That first taste of independence, huh?
JK:
[laughs] Yeah.
DH:
What did your dad do for a living?
JK:
Oh, my dad had his own business, direct mail advertising.
DH:
I see. Very good.
00:03:28
[Early aviation memories]
DH:
Now, this is a very special question to me because I think every one of us who’s ever
been an aviator has had some experience. What was your very first interest in airplanes?
Do you remember it?
JK:
Well, in the early years, I—my dad would take us down to the athletic club—take Herb
and I to the athletic club every Sunday morning. And this one particular Sunday morning,
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�8
he said, “Well, just finish up early and get dressed, and I got a deal. We’re going to go
out on a little trip.” And it turned out that he was taking us out to Robbinsdale Airport,
which was probably 20 miles out of Minneapolis, where I saw my first airplane.
DH:
Do you remember what it was?
JK:
Well, it was one of the early—I think it was de Havilland, but I’m not positive. Anyway,
there was room up in the front seat for three people. And so we got into that airplane—
see, I’m five, six years old, Herb was seven—and we went on our first airplane trip. And
it was such a thrill because when they started up the engine and all that noise and all that
clutter and everything, it was just getting to us. And we taxied out and took off. And I
still remember the flight as one of the greatest thrills of my life. I mean, to be six years
old, seven years old, and here we were up in the sky.
DH:
I think every pilot remembers that memory.
JK:
Yeah. [laughs]
DH:
Yeah. Now, I’m going to ask you a very special question. I ask every pilot this, and this is
a really tough question for you. What’s your favorite airplane and why?
JK:
[pauses] I have to be very honest with you.
DH:
Please do.
JK:
I love them all.
[laughter]
DH:
Well, I like to tell people my favorite airplanes have propellers on them and round edges.
JK:
I had no favorite. I loved every airplane that I ever was in equally because, to me, it was
such a thrill to be out flying. Never in those early days would I have ever dreamed that I
would have flown as much as I did, flown so many different airplanes. I probably have
flown at least a dozen different types of airplanes.
DH:
Sure. Yeah.
JK:
But it started out with that first flight. And it was a wartime airplane. My memory is not
working—
DH:
That’s okay. That’s fine.
JK:
—so I can’t tell you exactly.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE:
2013 © The Museum of Flight
Was it a Waco [unintelligible]?
�9
JK:
It was a biplane with an engine and two seats, front and back. The pilot sat in the back
and flew it.
00:06:49
[Experiences with model airplanes]
DH:
Now, I remember you—I read about you building model airplanes. That’s an experience
that I have, too. When did you start building model airplanes?
JK:
Well, the model airplanes started when I was about ten years old and Herb was eleven.
We got a model of an NC-4 kit to build this model. We built this model airplane in our
early teens. It was a beautiful biplane. It was a model of the first airplane that flew across
the Atlantic Ocean—
DH:
Curtis NC-4. Yes, sir.
JK:
—in 1914. So this was probably four or five years after it had made this first flight. Well,
we built this model, and we covered it with Japanese silk. And we had put so much work
into it that we were afraid to fly it. And so we ended up taking it up to school, and the
teacher hung it up in one of the classrooms. We had a friend, Bob Johnson, about the
same age as we, that saw that airplane up there, and it just drove him nuts. And he finally
convinced us that we should ask for the airplane and we would take it out and fly it. He
wanted to fly it. Well, see, this was probably by the time—as time went along, maybe ten
years old by this time.
And so we go down to Lake Minnetonka—no, Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis, and we got
a boat and took the airplane out. It was rubber-powered, two engines. So we got out into
the lake, the three of us, and this beautiful airplane—I mean, it was gorgeous. It was—all
this Japanese silk covering instead of paper and all that. Well, we got the engines all
wound up, but it was a kind of a windy day and the waves were maybe a foot or two feet
high. We should have had more sense, of course, but we didn’t. We were young. We got
the engines all wound up, we put the airplane in the water, and the props started turning
and waves come over and swamped the airplane. And we finally ended up pulling it out
in pieces.
DH:
Oh, dear.
JK:
That was the end of that model. Goes to show how stupid kids can be.
DH:
Well, you were a member of a model airplane club, too, back then, weren’t you?
JK:
Well, not that—not at that time. All through high school, I started building model
airplanes. We didn’t have any money available, so I couldn’t buy any balsa wood, so I
used cheese boxes. They came in wooden boxes in those days with nice, neat pine box—
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�10
pine wood, maybe three-eighths-of-an-inch thick, and we would shave it off, sticks and
make spars and carve all of our stuff out of these—the wood.
It wasn’t until after we—I entered a couple of contests and won some of them that I
ended up getting balsa wood as a prize. And so I had plenty of balsa wood, and I—all
through my high school years, I was building model airplanes and flying them.
DH:
Well, you built one that got a prize once, didn’t you? Back in 1928?
JK:
Well, I flew—in 1928, the city of Minneapolis had a… [pauses] What am I trying to say?
They had a meeting of all the modelers and a contest. And we had indoor contests and
outdoor contests. And I chose the indoor contest because that was the nature of my
models. They were small models, needed to have quiet, still air.
I remember the day of the contest, my turn came and I wound my airplane up, put it on
the floor, and it took off and it circled up. And it was going up to the ceiling, and the
thing going just fine, and somebody came and opened the door. And the draft of air out
that door—this was in a big, open area—that airplane just took one turn and went—
[makes sound effect]—right down and crashed on the floor. But it was up there so long
that I ended up winning first prize, and that’s where I got the cup on top of the… [points
to cup on top of bookcase]
DH:
Oh, my—do you remember what airplane type you made? What the model was of?
JK:
No, it was just a stick model.
DH:
Oh, one of the stick models.
JK:
A stick model with a rubber band.
DH:
Did you have a favorite model that you really thought you did the very best job with?
JK:
No, I don’t really feel attached to any one particular because I loved them all.
DH:
I know models had a great deal to do with my interest in aviation. How would you
characterize the influence that building models had on your career in aviation?
JK:
Well, actually, it was the most important thing of all because that’s what I did all through
high school, was build model airplanes. I graduated from high school mid-term in
January—in December. This was—we had our airplane contest in December of ’28, and
right after that, I graduated from high school. Left me mid-term with nothing to do.
DH:
Where’d you go to high school at? Do you remember the name of the school?
JK:
Oh, I went to Central High School in Minneapolis. It was probably ten blocks away from
my home, and I walked up there and back every day.
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�11
00:13:29
[Job as an ice cream and candy maker]
DH:
And when you graduated, did you—had you resolved already to become a pilot or did
you have something else in mind?
JK:
No. No, I had—this was all—all I do with airplanes, the model airplanes. I had no desire
to fly big ones. Never occurred to me.
So when I graduated, I’m stuck because I had thought after all the model building, the
logical place for me would be to go school and learn to be an aeronautical engineer and
build big airplanes. That was what I thought, but when I got—graduated from school, this
was 1929, just when the Depression started, and there was no money. My dad didn’t have
any money to send me to college. I didn’t have any money.
So I got a job working at a town pump, downtown Minneapolis, a place where they had
ice cream and sodas and candy and everything for guys to bring their girls in and treat
them. Yup. My job was to help the candy maker. Every day we made about fifty gallons
of ice cream. While the master chef was setting up the mix for the ice cream, I would be
down in this basement pulling all these tins of ice out of the freezer, getting the ice out
and putting it through a chopper to chop all the ice up. By the time I got about forty or
fifty of those chopped up, why, he’d bring down a hundred gallons of ice cream, and
we’d spend the morning churning ice cream.
DH:
I’ll bet you get sick and tired of ice cream after—
JK:
No, no. I never got tired of ice cream. [laughs] Well, after we’d do this—that was the
morning—in the afternoon, we’d make candy. And I remember we—making taffy. This
shows you how primitive things were. I mean, we had no machines to do any of this.
Now, when they get the candy mix made, for example, we’d mix up taffy, about forty
pounds of it. They had a post with a hook on it. And my job was to take this forty pounds
of candy and put it up over the hook, pull it down, swing it, loop it over, pull, loop it
over, pull. The purpose, of course, was to get all that air into the [unintelligible] to harden
up. Then we’d run up, take the whole bunch over to the table and start pulling it out, and
making what we called chicken bones. You might be familiar with those. They were just
taffy that was pulled out.
Well, I worked at that, and it was really hard work. I was—let’s see, I was twenty years
old. No, couldn’t have been twenty years old. I was seventeen, I think. Yeah, seventeen
years old. And I was—weighed 160 pounds, and I was—no, I only weighed 120 pounds.
And I was six feet tall.
DH:
Oh, my gosh.
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�12
JK:
So I was a skinny kid. And actually, the work was too tough. I could not stand it. I could
not handle it physically. I’d go home at night so tired out I couldn’t even eat dinner. I
worked about three or four weeks at the most, then I finally decided I had to quit.
00:17:19
[Working with Walter Bullock and job as a flight steward]
DH:
Well, let me ask you this.
JK:
Hmm?
DH:
Just to kind of change tactics just a little bit. What’s the name Walter Bullock mean to
you?
JK:
Well, I was just getting to Walter.
DH:
Good.
JK
[laughs] Because I’m telling you, it was after this—when I quit my job at the candy shop,
I had no job at all. And I ended up—the people that had been in the contest in December
decided to have a model airplane club. And I went to the first meeting in January, which
was just about the time I was quitting my job. As a matter of fact, I had just quit my job
when I went to the first meeting and I met Walter there.
Walter Bullock was an early-time aviator. He started flying in 1915. He was, as such, ten
years older than me. And Walter was a pilot for Northwest Airways. Well, he also was
interested in model airplanes, and he wrote an article for Popular Mechanics on how to
build a model of a Ford Trimotor. And people wrote in and said, “Where can we get kits
for this,” which forced him into starting a business of building kits.
When I met him, he was up to his eyeballs and needed help so bad, he looked at me and
he said, “I found out you just quit your job.” He said, “How much were you making?” I
said, “I was making twelve dollars a week.” He says, “Okay, I’ll pay you twelve dollars a
week, you come work for me.” So I went to work for Walter. And I go to his basement,
and we make parts and put them together into kits and fill out orders and mail them out.
He had written an article in Popular Mechanics, how to build a model of a Ford
Trimotor, and everybody and their brother was trying to get—they wanted kits. They
were just—it put everybody afire.
DH:
Do you remember how many you put together, how many you sold?
JK:
[laughs] I have no idea. Hundreds, anyway. It was a beautiful model. You put the pieces
together, and when you got through, you covered them with a little bit of—with a
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metal—thin metal, which [unintelligible] roller, so it had little grooves in it. But they
were beautiful models.
DH:
So did Walter lead you to Northwest Airlines and your subsequent career?
JK:
Well, no, he didn’t lead me to—it didn’t work that way. Well, keep in mind now, I’m a
shy kid, but by this time I’ve learned that if I want anything, I have to go and get it
because people don’t bring it around and give it to you. And so I was accustomed to
taking care of my own problems.
When I found out—talked to Walter—Walter took me on a trip—he would do test flights,
that he took me on a test flight one time. And then I found out that they had flight
stewards on those things. So I got up my nerve, and I said to Walter, “If you give me a
job as a flight steward, I’ll work for you on my days off for nothing.” Nothing was said
but—well, before that, he had taken me on the flight, so I knew what the airplane was
like. And that was what enamored me and got me courage enough to—
DH:
Was this a Ford Trimotor?
JK:
Yeah, it was a Ford Trimotor. When I found out they had flight stewards, I didn’t see any
reason why I couldn’t do that. So about a month after that, two months after that, Walter
comes home one day and he said, “You get your parents’ permission and you can go with
me on my flight to Chicago tomorrow morning.” Well, I mean, I was walking on clouds
all the way home. [laughs] And I get home—I mean, it’s just like yesterday—I said,
“Mom, Walter says I can go to Chicago with him on his flight tomorrow morning if I get
your permission.” Mom clouded up. “Oh, son,” she says, “you better go ask your father.”
So I went to Dad. “Dad, Walter says I can go to Chicago with him on his flight tomorrow
morning if I get your permission.” “Oh, son, you better go ask your mother.” Now, this is
absolutely exactly how it happened.
I had decided the two no’s had to be yes. And the reason that they were—he was taking
me on this flight was because they had lost their first airplane two weeks before this, and
the pilot had been killed. And was taking off of Saint Paul up over the bluffs, and the
engine stalled out, and they—the airplane came down, and the pilot was killed because he
was in the front seat with the copilot. The flight steward and the passengers came through
it okay with just bumps and bruises.
And so Bobby Johnson that had talked us into taking our model airplane out and flying it,
was—happened to be the flight steward. He was the same build as me. So that evening I
went over to Saint Paul at the hospital, got his uniform, and took it home. It had some
burn holes in it from flaming—fire pieces and some blood spots on it, and I spent the
evening wiping off the blood spots and coloring out the white stiffening behind the burn
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holes with blue ink so that it didn’t show them. And that’s the uniform I wore the next
morning.
DH:
I’ll bet that’s the only time a flight steward ever used a uniform like that.
JK:
[laughs, coughs] I was thrilled to death with the job. I was just absolutely in seventh
heaven. But it was a tough job because they had no—well, first of all, we were flying at
100 miles an hour. And that was unheard-of speed, you know. Cars on the highway were
doing 25, 30 miles an hour, and here is this airplane, 100 miles an hour. And my job was
to keep a tidy cabin. So the air was rough most of the time because we were always
flying—we didn’t know how to fly instruments, so we were flying official reference to
the ground at all times. And sometimes we’d get forced down to maybe 200 or 300 feet,
and it’d get pretty dicey. And we would end up looking for a farmer’s field and stop and
wait until the weather got better. But that’s still beside the story that I’m telling you.
Anyway, I found that people were getting sick. And all the company had given me to take
care of the cabin was a broom and a dustpan. Well, I got pretty dismal when I had people
throwing up on the walls and on the floors and everything. So I decided that we had to
have a better way of taking care of this, and I went down to the grocery store and bought
some paper bags of a suitable size with my own money. And so I claimed to have
invented the barf bag.
DH:
[laughs]
JK:
Well, I would bring the bags on the trip with me. Now, here we have an airplane with a
toilet in it, but it has a funnel that opens to the outside. And I would take these bags
down, and I would see a person about to get sick—you’d have to see it immediately, you
know exactly when they’re going to—I would hand him a bag and he would be using it,
then I’d snap another bag, grab that one, hand him the fresh bag and I’d run like mad
down to the back down of the ship, kick the door open, and throw the bag out. Now, if I
worked fast enough, I would get there before the bottom fell out, which—that was my
incentive for speed. Anything we didn’t want on the airplane, we threw it out, after
everything had blown to bits. This was the concepts in those days.
DH:
So did this have anything to do with your decision to take flight training, so you could get
out of all the collecting of the barf bags?
JK:
Well, it was only logical that—I came to the conclusion that I was doing all of the work,
and I was getting only $78 a month. And the pilot didn’t do anything but sit up in front
and fly that thing. And he got $700 a month.
Well, as part of this story, of course, when I got my job and got the $78 a month, my dad
said, “Joe, don’t you think now you should be able to pay a little room and board?” I said,
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“How much do you think it’s worth, Dad?” He said, “Oh, I’d say $30 a month.” I said,
“Okay, I’ll pay it.”
So it got towards winter. I was—to get to the airport, I would walk four blocks to the bus
line, take the bus line cross town, get off the bus, get on a street car, take it to the end of
the line, walk a mile to the airport, and get there for my first flight to Chicago and back. It
took twelve hours to get to Chicago and back. When I came home, I reversed the
procedure. Didn’t take me very long to figure out I had to have a car. Well, my brother
Herb says, “I’ll buy one with you.” I said, “Fine.”
So on that basis, I bought a brand new Model A Ford Coupe, $725. And I paid the down
payment, which was around $200. I had saved it. And the first payment comes due, and
Herb doesn’t have any money.
DH:
Oh, dear.
JK:
“I don’t have any money.” So I’m the only one who’s putting any money into it. I said,
“Okay, so I’ll pay for it.” So $30 to my Dad, $35 to the car for two years, I had lived on
$13 a month extra. And that’s what I used to do everything. [laughs] Well—
DH:
So when did you start—
JK:
You see, this shy kid is a stubborn kid, also.
00:29:13
[Becoming a pilot]
DH:
So when did you actually start to think about becoming a pilot yourself? Is that—did that
lead to that?
JK:
What’s that?
DH:
When did you first decide to become a pilot yourself?
JK:
Well, see, I had figured out all of this right at the very beginning. I figured I had the
wrong job, naturally, and the only way I could do what he was doing was to learn to fly.
Well, here I was $13 a month. There was no money to buy any flying. I go into the
company. I can still see Rosy Stein’s face. Rosy Stein was the assistant to the president.
And this is a small company that only had a very few people in it. So I said to her, “I
would like to borrow one of those Waco 10s out there.” There were two Waco 10s left
over from their flight school days. They weren’t using them, but they kept them. “I’d like
to borrow one of those airplanes.” She was shocked. I mean, there was just no question
about it, looking at her face. Finally, she said, “You’d have to pay for the gas and oil.” I
said, “I can do that.” Gasoline was only 19 cents a gallon.
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So now we’ve got an airplane. I go to Chad Smith. Chad Smith is one of the pilots that
was flying—that I flew with. I said, “Chad, I have an airplane. Will you teach me to fly?”
Chad says, “Sure, I’ll do that.” So he soloed me.
DH:
How long did it take you to solo?
JK:
Six hours.
DH:
Six hours?
JK:
Well, you see, I had been getting some time up sitting in the cockpit in flight, so I didn’t
have to get accustomed to being in the air or anything.
DH:
Six hours. That’s not too bad, though.
JK:
So then I ended up flying and building up my time. I got 50 hours, and I got my
commercial license. And then I—nothing changed. I’m still a flight attendant, and that’s
it. But I got my license finally, and about the time that I got my license, within 30 days,
the government came out with a new ruling stating that they had to have two pilots on
aircraft weighing 12,500 pounds or more. Now, the only airplane that fit that description
was a Ford Trimotor. Exactly 12,500 pounds, which meant they had to have two pilots
now, instead of just one. It was only natural then, with my license, that I became a
copilot. And the copilot, I think I was making $140 a month.
DH:
How long did you spend in the right-hand seat?
JK:
I flew that—when I got to be 23 years old, I finally got a commercial license—I mean,
what’s required of a real captain. And as soon as I got that license, I remember being
given a promotion to captain.
DH:
You became a Captain at 23?
JK:
Yeah.
DH:
Oh, my gosh.
JK:
My first job was to go to Fargo, North Dakota. And I flew from Fargo to Grand Forks to
[unintelligible] and turn around and came back. And then there was another guy,
Clarence Bates, doing the same thing. But between us, we kept the station open, also. So
we were station masters on our off days and captains on the alternate, just switching back
and forth, so they were covered for the whole station.
DH:
Let me ask you this. Do you still have your first wings? Your first wings you wore on
your uniform?
JK:
I have no idea.
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00:33:45
[Flight from Minneapolis to Seattle in 1933]
DH:
Okay. Now, in 1933, after you’d been a captain for a while, you flew a very special flight
from the Twin Cities to Seattle. Can you tell us a little bit about that flight?
JK:
Well, yes. That flight was made in January of 1933 and was made to prove that you could
fly from Minneapolis to Seattle during the winter, which everybody thought would be
impossible. And that was a trip that we made—Huey Rueschenberg was the captain, I
was the copilot. Croil Hunter went along, and then he had invited our friend—
DK:
Amelia Earhart.
JK:
—Amelia Earhart to join us.
DH:
Did you know who she was at the time?
JK:
Oh, yeah. She had just flown across the ocean. Everybody knew Amelia Earhart. She was
flying—she was going out to Portland, Oregon, to a speaking engagement and accepted
Croil’s invitation to ride on this proving flight, as far as Spokane, anyway.
So she was with us when we flew the first day from Minneapolis to Bismarck. Had a big
dinner at the governor’s mansion that night, just the crew and the governor’s family. The
next day, we took off and flew to Billings, had a big luncheon the Chamber of Commerce
put on for us. After we did that, we then took off to Helena that afternoon, had a big
dinner at the governor’s mansion in Helena. And the following morning, we were finally
on our final episode to cross the mountains.
Well, there was a gentleman we met at the party, an old-time rancher who claimed to
have known the mountains like he knew the back of his hand. And he offered to go along
with us and show us how to get through the mountains, which we thought was a good
idea. It was just Huey and I, the president, and Amelia and this guy, take off the next
morning at Helena. So as soon as we got airborne, he says, “You go up this canyon here.”
So we flew up the canyon. We get into a horrendous storm, and it was raining so hard we
can’t see anything except straight down and out the side. And right in the middle of this
storm, he comes up and he says, “You got to turn around. This is a blind gorge. I’m sorry.
I made a mistake.”
Well, we couldn’t turn around till we got out of that weather, so naturally we’re sweating
for quite a bit there, then finally get out, turn around, and go back through it. So he says,
“Now, I’m sorry, but this is the one you should have gone up.” So we went up, and to
make a long story short, same thing. By this time, Huey had had about all he could
handle. Now, he was a very quiet individual, not very prone to speaking out or anything.
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He turned and he said, “Mr. [Sheriff?], thank you for your help, but we don’t—we will
get along okay. Why don’t you just go back and sit there and get comfortable and we’ll
fly it.” So we went on without [Sheriff’s?] help.
And we got to Mullen Pass, and there was absolutely no way in the world we would get
over Mullen Pass because it was clouds right on top of mountain. And so we started back,
and we went back as far as…my mind is…
DH:
Don’t worry about it.
JK:
there’s a town there that’s nestled up against the mountains, and behind it there was a Vshape like this. [demonstrates with his hands] And you could look through and see
something on the other side. We didn’t know what. We couldn’t understand. We’re in
territory we know nothing about.
Hugh has the courage to go up and go through that gap, and we get over to the other side,
and we see there’s a river that goes like this. [makes a snaking pattern] And so we follow
this river, and it rainsqualls occasionally and can’t see hardly anything, then they clear
up. And we end up to the—where we end up at the north end of Coeur d’ Alene Lake,
which is a long lake on the west side of the mountains. And all—for all practical
purposes, when we went through that gap at Missoula—Missoula was the name of the
town—we had actually crossed the mountains.
So we get into—when we get into the Spokane Airport, we ran into a snowsquall just as
we got to the airport. And when we got—when we landed, it was snowing great big
flakes of snow. And we taxied up the ramp, and there was a whole bunch of United
Airline pilots there sitting out the weather. They wondered how they got—wondered how
they squeezed from Minnesota, got that airplane into that field. We didn’t tell them it was
clear as a bell until we got within two or three miles from the airport. [laughter]
Well, we went downtown. My job—Croil said, “I want you to make arrangements for
rooms for all of us and get something real nice for Amelia Earhart. I mean, something.”
So I went to the hotel. Here I am—let’s see, at that time I’m 21 years old, still a shy kid,
but I got a job to do. So I go to the Davenport Hotel and make arrangements for a room
for Croil and a room for Huey and I and then, “So we have a very special guest with us.
We’d like to have a nice stateroom for her. Amelia Earhart.” So, “We have a suite of
rooms.” I said, “I’d like to see it.”
So they took me up, and here was the suite, two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a
dining room, just really first class. That was $75 a night. I said, “We’ll take it.” Our
rooms cost $15. [laughs, coughs] So when Croil came in and saw what we had for
Amelia Earhart, he was thrilled to death because nobody had come—called us up,
nobody knew we were coming. And he said, “We’re going to have a banquet in Amelia’s
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suite.” So we arranged for the hotel to furnish a full-class dinner to be served in Amelia’s
dining room that evening when just the five or six of us were in there at that meeting.
DH:
Did you get to talk to her very much? What were your impressions?
JK:
I got to talk to her a little bit but not—I mean, nothing really special. It was just nice to
know her. As a matter of fact, I have a picture on the kitchen wall that I took of her in the
suite with my Brownie camera. It’s hanging on the cupboard.
DH:
Okay. We’ll take a look at that after a while.
JK:
Yeah, you’ll have to take a look.
00:42:12
[Involvement with the Air Line Pilots Association and Quiet Birdmen]
DH:
Well, that’s wonderful. Let me just jump it forward a little bit. I understand that you had a
central role in the Air Line Pilots Association, ALPA, during you career.
JK:
A separate role?
DH:
A central role in the Air Line Pilots Association?
JK:
Well, I really joined the Air Line Pilots Association—I was one of the original founders,
but that’s the only thing I can relate to that. I mean, that—
DH:
Did you think it was necessary at the time to have something like ALPA for the pilots’
benefit?
JK:
Oh, definitely, we—that was the pilots’ idea, and they—see, we used to meet pilots from
other airlines when we flew into Chicago. And that was—the only conversations were
among pilots that were flying into Chicago. We’d meet there. W’d get tagged up with
weather sometimes and we’d sit around, be talking about the job and all that. And it was
that meeting of those guys that they decided to form an association. And so the ALPA
was founded basically in that manner. And they got together, and I didn’t have any real
part in the structure. I was just a kid.
DH:
Sure.
JK:
The pilots all took care of that. But I was a charter member.
DH:
Very good. I think you were also inducted into the Quiet Birdmen as well, weren’t you?
JK:
Yes, I joined the QBs. That was another interesting association. They’re very important
to all of us, the QBs.
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DH:
Do you remember when you were inducted?
JK:
No, it had to be early in the—probably in the ‘30s sometime. I don’t have any
recollection of any particular moment.
00:44:27
[Service with the U.S. Army Air Corps]
DH:
Sure. Now, you enlisted in—at the very beginning of World War II, didn’t you?
JK:
Well, no. I didn’t enlist, really. That came about in a rather subtle way. After I got my job
as a captain, I’m flying back and forth to Chicago, and every time I land east, I look out
my window as I’m flying. Here is an Air Force base that has a bunch of airplanes in a
row. And I look down, and they were Army pursuit ships. Gee, it’d be a lot of fun to fly
one of those. But I keep looking at them.
So finally, after some period of time, I decided that I had to fly one of those. And in order
to do it—I looked into it, and in order to do it, I had to join the Enlisted Reserves, after
which I could then apply for a rating and I could get to fly one. This took about—it took a
year because I had to take a correspondence course. I took this correspondence course
over a period of a year on learning how to be an officer and a gentleman. And I was
flying into Chicago from Minneapolis about every other day, spending maybe four hours
on the ground in between the time I landed and the time—and I thought that would be a
wonderful time to go and fly one of those P-12Es.
So I went through all that. It took a year. That just shows you the stubbornness part of
me. Finally, I got my application in for flight duty, and so I got my check flight. And they
taught me—I mean, they checked me out in the P-12E, and so now I’m a second
lieutenant in the military. This is in 1938. Well, there was a war coming along, and I
debated whether it was really smart to take the risk of being in the war, but I decided that
I had to do it. It just—that was just not going to deter me.
So I ended up on my next flight—after I got qualified and got my check write-off, I
waited until the next trip I went to Chicago. It was a beautiful day. I parked my airplane. I
have four hours. I came over to the squadron, drew a P-12E, and taxied out and decided
to go north of town. And I end up flying up just around Evanston and doing loops. And I
didn’t know much about stunting. Only thing I really knew how to do was to do spins
because when Chad Smith checked me out, he had me do spins until he told me to stop.
And after about a week or two, I said, “You still want me doing spins?” “Sure,” he says.
“You can quit now.” [laughter] But he had no idea. I spun and spun and spun for two
weeks every day.
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Well, so here I am ten years later, and here I am in this wonderful airplane, and I—after
trying loops and Immelmanns and things of that kind, so I decided to loop—I mean, to
spin it. And I pulled it up. The second I pulled the stick back, all of a sudden it kicks off,
and it goes around and around. And I went on to do my other stunt work.
Finally, I decided that has to spin tighter than that. So I decided to take it up and snap roll
it into a spin, which is a process where you line up the airplane, you kick the rudder, and
pull the stick back sharply, and the airplane goes up and over and down. I think I’d been
doing all this other work at 3,000 feet. I figured, well, I better go up higher for some
reason or other. So I went to 6,000 feet. Got it all squared away, slowed it down, kicked
the rudder, and pulled the stick back, and it went [makes sound effect] and started
spinning tighter and tighter. And I reversed controls and nothing happened. I went down
to 5,000 feet, 4,000 feet, to 3,000 feet, and I thought, I got to get out of this thing. It’s not
coming out.
So I unfastened my seatbelt and had a hold of the ripcord on my parachute and one hand
on the cockpit side, and I stepped over the side of the airplane—or got one foot on the
wing and was out in there in the air about like this [leans to the side], ready to pull the
cord as soon as I got clear, and the airplane started to slow down. I got back in, and I rode
it out. Two thousand feet, 1,500 feet, got down to 1,000 feet, and it finally came out. I
want to tell you, I was one scared cookie. That’s something I’ll never forget.
DH:
A little bit different than flying a Ford Trimotor, huh?
JK:
[laughs] Well, you know, I never flew another Army airplane. I didn’t—
DH:
So you had a reserve commission. Did you serve—
JK:
So I’m in the reserves, and I don’t pay any attention to anything. So 1941 comes around,
and we go to war, and they called me into active duty. And the only experience I’d had
was that one session with that one spin. Well, I was disappointed because I was making
$1,500 a month as a captain, and I ended up in the military at $244.50, which was quite a
jolt. As it turned out, it was a blessing in disguise, of course, because I look at my service
in the military as a very important part of my growing up.
DH:
Were you with Air Transport Command or—
JK:
I ended up with the—in the Special Missions Group, which is a group based in
Washington, D.C. that provided service to all the important VIPs, Very Important People,
that wanted to go someplace. And during the war, there was always somebody going
someplace. Admirals, generals, congressmen, you name it. Anybody that had enough
clout to get an airplane would come to the Special Missions Group and get one with a
crew.
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DH:
I’ll bet you may have flown a very specially-equipped Douglas B-18. It was fitted out as
a transport. Because they had one in that unit.
JK:
A what?
DH:
A Douglas B-18? It looked like a DC-3?
JK:
No, I flew mostly heavier aircraft. [coughs] We flew… [pauses] The B-29s were one
thing that were also made into cargo ships.
DH:
Yes.
JK:
And we flew—let’s see. It’s my mind. My mind is just not working.
DH:
That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.
JK:
I could find it in all that stuff. There were several aircraft that I flew during the war, but
they were all four-engine, taking people all through the Pacific Theater. At the height of
the war, I was flying into Manila and all the areas where all the fighting was taking on,
but fortunately never got shot down. All through Europe. It was a wonderful experience,
three and a half years of it.
00:54:00
[Postwar flying career and retirement]
DH:
That’s wonderful. What finally brought you out to Seattle on a permanent basis?
JK:
[coughs ] Well, I think the fact that I was growing tired of the flying from Seattle to
Chicago. I mean, there was other fields. By that time, the government—the company had
started flying to the Orient. And that intrigued me, but in order to fly to the Orient, I had
to move to Seattle. So I put in my bid for the Orient and checked out—flew out from
Minneapolis to Seattle. I moved—I think it was in November of ‘57. Yeah. And I came
out here, and I started flying to the Orient.
DH:
Were you flying DC-7s then?
JK:
No, we were flying—to start with, we were flying Electras, and then we went through…
[pauses] Well, basically, it’s all in there. [points to logbooks on table]
DH:
Okay.
JK:
I just—my mind doesn’t seem to function anymore. But I flew all the four-engine stuff.
DH:
You went all the way from the Ford Trimotor to the Boeing 747.
JK:
Yeah, it’s on the last page of that.
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DH:
Right. Can you tell us about the—your experience when the first 747 rolled out that you
saw?
JK:
[pauses]
DH:
Do you remember that? The first time you saw a 747?
JK:
I never got to fly a 747.
DH:
Okay. Were you there when the first one was rolled out for Northwest?
JK:
Northwest had the first 747s in about 1958 or so. But they would not check me out in the
747 because Nyrop [Donald Nyrop] says, “It cost too much money, $50,000, and I’m not
going to spend that kind of money to let you fly something for just one year.” And I said,
“Well, you have to. I have a contract.” He said, “Well, file a grievance,” knowing full
well the grievance process was going to take so long that I’d be over the age of eight—
over—
DH:
Now, I understand you took up a hobby of some kind as a result of that experience. Is that
true?
JK:
Well, I took up a lot of hobbies. I was crushed when they took my license away from me
at age 60 because I was healthy, really healthy, and there was no necessity for it.
DH:
I understand
JK:
There was just one man’s opinion, Donald Nyrop, who was [unintelligible] a nice guy,
but I never forgave him for what he did there.
Anyhow, I had about eighteen months—no, eight months or so to fly, and I decided I was
going to probably—going to use up my sick leave. And the best way to do that was to
take up skiing and end up falling and breaking a leg, and then I used up all my sick leave.
That way I’d get even with them. [laughs] Well, I fell down more mountainsides than you
can think of and never, ever ended up hurting myself. And I flew until I was 95 years old,
and I enjoyed all of it. But I finally quit because it was just too much effort.
DH:
Did you own your own airplane?
JK:
Huh?
DH:
Did you own your own airplane?
JK:
Oh, just for a brief moment I had an interest in a Mohawk Pinto. But another thing I got
into after I retired: here I was sitting around healthy and nothing to do. And I ended up
with retirement income, which was not great, but it should have been enough to take care
of me. So I took up scuba diving when I was 60, and I dove in the diving here in the
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islands. I joined a club called the Prop Dodgers, and every month we’d take a boat out of
Anacortes and go out into the Sound and find a place to dive. I dove as deep as 100 feet,
and I enjoyed it, thoroughly enjoyed it. But I did that until I was about 75 years old, and
then I put that aside. And the most difficult part was to keep active, trying to find things
to keep active with.
DH:
I understand.
JK:
That was a tough time.
DH:
You have had a spectacular flying career in the course of your life. If you had something
that you would like to pass along to the next generation of pilots, if you had something
that you wanted to tell them that would be important for them to know, what would it be?
JK:
I don’t know. You just have to go with the flow. And my life has been so wonderful in
spite of all of the bad parts, where you have close escapes and stuff of that kind. I
truthfully can say that my life was so wonderful, I would cheerfully do the whole thing
over again. How many people can say that?
DH:
Well, that’s all the questions we have for you, sir. Do you have anything you’d like to tell
us?
JK:
No, I have no advice.
01:00:26
[Final questions]
DH:
Gentlemen, do you have anything you’d like to add?
GEOFF NUNN:
What was your ski resort of choice? I’m also—
JK:
My what?
DH:
Your ski resort.
GN:
Your ski resort. Where did you go to ski regularly?
JK:
Well, I skied mostly up at the Summit.
GN:
Okay.
JK:
No, not the Summit, but—
GN:
Stevens?
JK:
Stevens Pass.
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�25
GN
I’m a Stevens Pass skier myself.
JK:
My favorite. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. I skied until I was 95, and then I decided that
was enough.
DH:
Penny, do you have any questions you can think of you’d like to add?
PENNY:
[unintelligible] What was your favorite place to fly to?
DH:
What was your favorite destination as a pilot?
JK:
Well, you know, when you’re flying, you don’t have any requirements or any—wherever
it was, it was interesting. I’m happy that I—in all of my flying, instead of having to fly,
say, between Minneapolis and Chicago, and never having done anything else, that would
have been sad. But the flying I did took me all over the world. I flew so many places. I
would—I mean, I loved it all.
DH:
Did you have any close calls?
JK:
Yeah, a couple.
DH:
Any you want to tell us about?
UV:
How about the one with the engine [unintelligible], Dad?
JK:
Well, I think the first one happened about 1932,’33, when we were flying a flight to
Chicago. It was a nice, sunny day, and we ended up flying at 5,000 feet. We had about 12
passengers, Ford Trimotor. I’m flying the airplane, and the captain is just sitting there.
And all of a sudden, there’s a tremendous jolt. And the captain immediately reached up
and started cutting switches and pulling throttles back, and I said, “What’s going on?” He
says, “Take a look out here.” I got out of my seat and got over and looked over, and
there’s—I said, “The engine’s gone.” He said, “Well, look down, look down.” So I
looked down further, and here the engine is lying in the landing gear. About 15 inches of
the propeller had broken off. One made one turn this way, the engine made a turn the
opposite direction and rolled out and broke the [unintelligible] and landed down.
Now, we had sat around Chicago for lots and lots of arguments about what would
happen, for example, when an engine fell off an airplane. And everybody agreed that you
wouldn’t be able to—about half of everybody said you wouldn’t be able to hold it and the
other half said it wouldn’t make any difference. Nobody knew. And here it was the first
time it had ever happened.
Well, we didn’t really know what was going to happen till we got rid of it, and the pilot
decided he couldn’t land with that there. So we went out in the middle of the river and we
lined up with the river and he dropped the nose and wiggled the tail with the rudder
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�26
pedals and shook the engine loose and it tumbled off. So we went in and landed, and he
landed with the right gear. We went along fine until we dropped down, caught, and it
caught the wheel and the airplane swerved around and the tail comes up like this [leans
forward] and then fell back. [laughter] So we got through it.
So we ended up going into the airport—or the hangar, and after a few minutes the
telephone rang and a voice said, “Anybody lose an engine around there?” Here we
thought we were dropping this engine in the water so it wouldn’t hurt anybody, not
realizing that when you’re traveling at 100 miles an hour, you’re throwing it, too. And we
threw it far enough to land in a field about 200 feet from where a guy was building a
chicken coup. So he was the one that called us. Well, the company recovered the engine.
Mechanics were kind enough to cut the pistons in half and [unintelligible] made me an
ashtray. That’s up there on top. [points to top of bookcase]
DH:
That’s wonderful
JK:
You can probably see that.
DH:
I see one up there. I see it.
JK:
Yeah.
DH:
Well, thank you very much, sir. We have enjoyed this so much. I don’t want to wear you
out. I think we’ve got more than enough.
GN:
Yeah. Do you want to—just, you know, let you guys relax and get a couple of close-up
shots of some of the things that he mentioned.
DH:
Would you mind if we took some—
JK:
No, no. You’re welcome to take pictures of any of these.
DH:
Very good.
JK:
This is my life around here.
DH:
I can see that.
JK:
[points off camera] That one over there, I was elected to the Minnesota Aviation Hall of
Fame. So if you want any information, you can go into the Internet, type the name “Joe
Kimm,” and you’ll come up with quite a bit of information.
DH:
Oh, we’ve already done that.
JK:
You’ve done that.
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�27
DH:
We’ve done that.
UV:
Now, Kim, my niece, has some more stories if you’re interested.
DH:
We sure would. And would love to see the rest of those tapes that she did sometime, too.
I know that this is just very superficial, but this is—we wanted to start with this. And
maybe at some point, we can come back [unintelligible] and see you again if we need to.
JK:
Yeah. I’m here. I can’t guarantee how long because, actually, I find that I’m sliding
pretty far now.
DH:
I understand, sir. I don’t want to wear you out. That’s the thing.
JK:
I’m okay so long as I’m sitting here.
DH:
Okay.
JK:
It was kind of you to come by and give me a chance to tell my story, because I’m really
kind of proud of it.
DH:
Thank you so much. We are so much in your debt, believe me. We owe you.
JK:
Well, you don’t owe me anything, but I’m happy to know that you’ll do something with
it.
DH:
We will. Yes, sir.
JK:
And I’m sure that you’ll be interested in the tapes that Kim has. And she’d be happy to—
DH:
And we would sure like to see your logbooks. If you ever decide you want to give your
logbooks a good home, we would sure love to have them at the Museum, unless you want
to keep them in the family. We regard logbooks as the most primary of all documents, in
terms of research and authenticity.
JK:
What do you do with logbooks besides putting them in a drawer someplace?
DH:
Researchers use them. All the time. Last year, we had over 1,500 researchers at the
Museum researching aviation history. And logbooks are a primary source.
JK:
Well, I haven’t decided what to do with my logbooks. I think the two areas that are
possibly interested in it would be—
DH:
I just want to let you know.
JK:
—Museum of Flight and also, Northwest retirement.
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�28
DH:
Sure. Well, you let us know. If you ever decide you want to do that, we would love—I
just want to let you know that we would love to have them in the collection. We would
love to have them.
01:08:24
[END OF INTERVIEW]
2013 © The Museum of Flight
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Museum of Flight Oral History Collection
Description
An account of the resource
<p>The <strong>Museum of Flight Oral History Collection</strong> chronicles the personal stories of individuals in the fields of aviation and aerospace, from pilots and engineers to executives. This collection, which dates from 2013 to present, consists of digital video recordings and transcripts, which illustrate these individuals’ experiences, relationship with aviation, and advice for those interested in the field. By the end of 2019, approximately 76 interviews will have had been conducted. The interviews range in length from approximately 20 minutes to 4 hours and 45 minutes. Most interviews are completed in one session, but some participants were interviewed over multiple occasions.</p>
<p>The personal stories in this collection span much of the modern history of flight, from the Golden Age of Aviation in the 1930s, to the evolution of jet aircraft in the mid-twentieth century, to the ongoing developments of the Space Age. The selected interviewees represent a wide range of career paths and a diverse cross-section of professionals, each of whom made significant contributions to their field. Among the many interviewees are Calvin Kam, a United States Army veteran who served as a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War; Robert “Bob” Alexander, a mechanical engineer who helped design the Hubble Telescope; and Betty Riley Stockard, a flight attendant during the 1940s who once acted as a secret parcel carrier during World War II.</p>
<p>The production of the videos was funded by Mary Kay and Michael Hallman. Processing and cataloging of the videos was made possible by a 4Culture "Heritage Projects" grant.</p>
<p>Please note that materials on TMOF: Digital Collections are presented as historical objects and are unaltered and uncensored. See our <a href="https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/disclaimers-policies">Disclaimers and Policies</a> page for more information.</p>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2013-current
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Museum of Flight (Seattle, Wash.)
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
oral histories (literary works)
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://archives.museumofflight.org/repositories/2/resources/6">Guide to the Museum of Flight Oral History Collection</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights Holder
A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource.
The Museum of Flight Archives
Rights
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Permission to publish material from the Museum of Flight Oral History Collection must be obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
Bibliographic Citation
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The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection/The Museum of Flight
Identifier
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2019-00-00.100
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Kimm, Joseph Edward, 1911-2013
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Hagedorn, Dan
Biographical Text
<p>Joseph Kimm had a 42-year long career with Northwest Airways and served with the Special Missions Group during World War II.</p>
<p>Joseph Edward Kimm was born August 18, 1911 in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Albert Peter and Catherine Kimm. He attended Central High School in Minneapolis, graduating in 1929. Because of the Depression, his family could not afford to send him to college, so he found a job helping make candy at a soda fountain.</p>
<p>As a child he enjoyed building model airplanes. At a meeting for model airplane makers he met Walter Bullock, an early aviator who shared Kimm’s hobby. When Kimm quit his job at the soda fountain, Bullock hired him to help make and sell model airplane kits. Bullock also flew for Northwest Airlines and invited Kimm on a flight. Having enjoyed the flight, Kimm then asked Bullock to help him get a job as a flight steward. Kimm was hired by Northwest Airways July 1, 1929 to serve as steward on the then-new Ford Trimotors. His primary task was to keep the airplane cabin clean. Kimm claims to have invented the air sickness bag while he was working as a steward. Realizing that being a pilot would be more a lucrative job, he sought out flight training. He began working for Northwest as co-pilot, and once he had earned his commercial pilot’s license he was promoted to captain in 1933 at the age of 23. His first route was between Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota.</p>
<p>Over the course of his piloting career, he was involved in opening up two important air routes, one from Minneapolis to Seattle, Washington across the northern Rockies. That flight had Amelia Earhart as a passenger, who was publicizing both her recent book and their history-making flight. He also opened a route across previously uncharted territory from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska.</p>
<p>Fascination with the P-12E motivated him to join the Army Air Corps Reserves prior to the U.S. entry into World War II. This later led to him being called into wartime active duty in 1941 as one of the few dozen pilots forming the Special Missions Group (Brass Hat Squadron) during the war. In this role, he flew various dignitaries around the world, including Senator Albert Hawkes, Mexican Air Force General Salinas, and then General Dwight D. Eisenhower.</p>
<p>In October 1956, Kimm and Senior Captain “Deke” DeLong marked Northwest’s 30th Anniversary by flying a restored Ford Trimotor coast to coast to mark the occasion. Treated like celebrities at every stop, Kimm and DeLong appeared on the Arthur Godfrey Show in New York.</p>
<p>Kimm flew his final Northwest Boeing 707 flight on August 17, 1971. In his retirement years he enjoyed skiing, scuba diving, and delivering Meals on Wheels until he was well into his 90s. Kimm lived to be 102 years old, passing away on September 19, 2013.</p>
<p>Biographical information derived from interview and additional information provided by interviewee.</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Joseph Kimm oral history interview
Description
An account of the resource
Born-digital video recording of an oral history with Joseph Kimm and interviewer Dan Hagedorn, recorded as part of The Museum of Flight Oral History Program, May 31, 2013.
Abstract
A summary of the resource.
<p>Pilot Joseph E. Kimm is interviewed about his decade-spanning aviation career. He discusses his early experiences as a flight steward on Ford Trimotor aircraft, and his time as a copilot and pilot for Northwest Airways (later Northwest Airlines), spanning the 1930s to the 1970s. He also touches on his military service during World War II with Air Transport Command, U.S. Army Air Corps. Other topics discussed include his work building aircraft models, his experiences with various aircraft, and a memorable flight from Minneapolis to Seattle with Amelia Earhart.</p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Early aviation memories -- Experiences with model airplanes -- Job as an ice cream and candy maker -- Working with Walter Bullock and job as a flight steward -- Becoming a pilot -- Flight from Minneapolis to Seattle in 1933 -- Involvement with the Air Line Pilots Association and Quiet Birdmen -- Service with the U.S. Army Air Corps -- Postwar flying career and retirement -- Final questions
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2013-05-31
Subject
The topic of the resource
Air pilots
Air pilots, Military
Airplanes--Models;
Bullock, Walter, 1889-1986
Earhart, Amelia, 1897-1937
Flight attendants
Kimm, Joseph Edward, 1911-2013
Northwest Airways, Inc.
United States. Army. Air Corps
Waco (OH) 10 Family
World War, 1939-1945
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Chicago (Ill.)
Illinois
Minneapolis (Minn.)
Minnesota
Seattle (Wash.)
Spokane (Wash.)
United States
Washington (State)
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Museum of Flight (Seattle, Wash.)
Extent
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1 recording (1 hr., 8 min., 24 sec.) : digital
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
oral histories (literary works)
born digital
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection (2019-00-00-100), Digital Recordings
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Bibliographic Citation
A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible.
The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection/The Museum of Flight
Identifier
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OH_Kimm_Joseph
OH_Kimm_Joseph_transcription
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Objects from the William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers
Description
An account of the resource
Objects from the William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers
Identifier
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2000-06-20, Objects
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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2000-06-20_object_311_01
2000-06-20_object_311_02
2000-06-20_object_311_03
Title
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Plaque/The Research Director's Association of Chicago, William Lear, 1970
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers (2000-06-20), Objects
Creator
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Scroll Studios
Research Director's Association of Chicago
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Entrepreneur of the Year Award given to William P. Lear by the Research Directors' Association of Chicago, May 1970. A paper certificate is mounted under clear acrylic affixed to a wood base. </p><p>Text: "The Research Directors' Association of Chicago / dedicated to fostering a creative and innovative environment for the utilization of science and engineering for the benefit of all mankind / and / recognizing the contributions of selfless and dedicated innovators, who have provided talent, energy, resourcefulness, patience and perseverance to create and promote materials and services for such purposes, does present this / Entrepreneur of the Year Award / for 1970 to / William P. Lear, Ph.D. / In recognition of his many personal achievements and especially those represented by / Lear Motors Corporation / Given the fifth month of 1970."</p>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1970-05
Subject
The topic of the resource
Lear, William P. (William Powell), 1902-1978
Research Director's Association of Chicago
Lear Motors Corporation
Coverage
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Chicago (Ill.)
Illinois
United States
Extent
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1 plaque : wood, paper, and acrylic ; 28 x 33 x 3 cm
Language
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English
Format
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plaques (flat objects)
awards
Bibliographic Citation
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The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers/The Museum of Flight
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
-
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Objects from the William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers
Description
An account of the resource
Objects from the William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers
Identifier
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2000-06-20, Objects
Still Image
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2000-06-20_object_152_01
2000-06-20_object_152_02
Title
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Plaque/Entrepreneur of the Year, Moya Olsen Lear
Source
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The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers (2000-06-20), Objects
Creator
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Research Directors' Association of Chicago, Inc.
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Entrepreneur of the Year Award given to Moya Olsen Lear by the Research Directors' Association of Chicago, Inc., March 1982. The engraved metal plate is mounted on a wood base with a circular metal filigree embedded in top left corner.</p><p>Text: "The Research Directors' Association of Chicago, Inc. / Dedicated to fostering a creative and innovative environment for the utilization of science and engineering for the benefit of all mankind, / And / Recognizing the contributions of a selfless, dedicated innovator who has provided talent, energy, financing, resourcefulness, patience and perseverance to create and promote materials and machines for such purposes, does present this / Entrepreneur of the Year Award / For 1982 to / Moya Olsen Lear / Given the third month of 1982."</p>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1982-03
Subject
The topic of the resource
Lear, Moya Olsen, 1915-2001
Research Directors' Association of Chicago, Inc.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Chicago (Ill.)
Illinois
United States
Extent
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1 plaque : wood and metal ; 37 x 28 x 2 cm
Language
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English
Format
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plaques (flat objects)
awards
Bibliographic Citation
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The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers/The Museum of Flight
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
-
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PDF Text
Text
The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers
The Museum of Flight
Seattle, Washington
[William P. Lear discusses his life story (Part 2 of 3)]
Date: circa 1960
Location: Geneva, Switzerland
�2
Abstract:
These audio recordings contain a three-part oral history of William P. Lear, recorded at the Lear
home in Geneva, Switzerland, circa 1960s. In Part Two, Lear continues to discuss his
engineering career in Chicago, Illinois during the mid-1920s and early 1930s, including his
transition from automobile radios to aircraft radio equipment. He also begins to discuss his move
to New York in 1934. Other topics discussed include his early aviation experiences; stories about
Reeder Nichols, Clyde Pangborn, and other aviators; and a navigation race in Florida in the mid1930s, which is continued in Part Three. Lear’s son, Bill Lear Jr., is also briefly heard.
During the recording, Lear references a person named Jean (possibly “Jeanne” or “Gene”), who
asked for autobiographical information about Lear.
Restrictions:
Permission to publish material from the William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers must be
obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
Transcript:
Transcribed by Pioneer Transcription Services. Reviewed by TMOF volunteers and staff.
�3
Index:
Experiences in Chicago, Illinois as a radio engineer, continued from Part One ............................ 4
Aviation experiences and memorable flights; personal life in Chicago ....................................... 22
Stories about the automobile radio business; transition to aircraft radio development ................ 28
Move to New York; stories about aviators ................................................................................... 39
Navigation race in Florida ............................................................................................................ 42
�4
[William P. Lear discusses his life story (Part 2 of 3)]
[START OF RECORDING]
[Begin Side A]
00:00:00
[Experiences in Chicago, Illinois as a radio engineer, continued from part one]
WILLIAM P. LEAR: —[unintelligible] there was—that in my anxiety to be worth what Mr.
Grunow [Bill Grunow] was paying me, I tried to think of some things and—but I want to
go back now to 1925, I think it was, when the radio show—the first radio show—
MOYA O. LEAR:
When you didn’t have any money?
WPL: Now, wait a minute. No, no, this was—no, this was 19—yeah, 1925. No, ‘25 was the
radio show where I had no money. ‘26 was the radio show now that they decided they
wouldn’t have any longer a public radio show for the public to come to, but they would
have a manufacturers’ radio show, where just the manufacturers could come and show
their stuff to the dealers and the distributors and so forth. And the public was excluded.
And in order to do this, they had it in the Stevens Hotel, which was the opening of the
Stevens Hotel. And this was the largest hotel of its kind in the world at the time, and I
think it had over 1,000 rooms or something like that.
And there was a man by the name of—I think his name was [Clayton Erwin?], [Jay
Clayton Erwin?] or something like that, a real dynamic sort of a guy that’s still around
someplace. And he organized for the Radio Manufacturers Association, which I think it
later would—later became the Radio Manufacturers Association, this show. And they
were ready to open it up now to—on, we’ll say, a certain day. And they discovered, lo
and behold, that there was no way to operate the radio sets because although they’d had
these big inverters put in and wires run all over the halls to pipe AC current to the various
rooms—
[hammering noise in background]
WPL: —because the hotel itself was DC, and all the radio sets were operating at that time now
on off AC. And so in order to make the thing to allow the manufacturers to be able to
demonstrate their equipment in the various rooms, they had to have this auxiliary power
supply installed. And when they installed it, they had once more neglected to try it out on
a radio set. And about three days before the show, somebody thought about the idea of
trying a radio set on it, and they found out that the noise that was created by this inverter
was so terrific that you couldn’t get a particle of radio through the noise. So somebody
�5
had to get in there and fix that thing. And they knew that I had done some rather
interesting things in this respect—or successful things in this respect. And so they called
me in. And the fellow that called me in was our friend Waldorf again. That’s Waldorf
Smith. And so he said, “Now,” he said, “I think we can fix this, but we’ve got to do it
with big capacitors and big [unintelligible] and so forth.”
So I thought about it for a while, and I thought, “No, this is not that kind of current. We
can’t do that with AC current because no AC will come through. We’ve got to fix this at
radio frequency.” And I probably was the first one to ever work on the problem of
suppressing radio frequency interference in a rectifier or in a rotary converter or a
generator. And right there in the hotel, literally right up to the deadline, a fix had to be
found, and I found it working with Waldorf Smith. He was my—he was the man that was
doing the work for me. I told him what to do. And when I told him what to do—
remember now, Waldorf Smith was a graduate engineer and knew an awful lot about
engineering and actually was the chief engineer of the Carter Manufacturing Company,
was one of the old, original radio component manufacturers.
And so when I told him what to do, he said, “Well, that’s absolutely crazy.” He said,
“That can’t work.” And I said, “Well, let’s try it anyway.” Well, we tried it, and it was
the answer. And he said he never saw anything so damn foolish in his life, but
nevertheless, it did the job and I guess it was all right. So this solved the problem for [Mr.
Erwin?], and he was very happy. And as a matter of fact, the manufacturer of the rotary
converters for the Bodine Company—and at that time, Roy Hill was working for the
Bodine Company, and he made an arrangement with me to pay me—I think it was 5
percent for the use of my invention on every one of his rotary converters, plus I think he
gave me $2,500 down.
MOL: How long did he pay you that?
WPL: Oh, for about five years. Matter of fact, that bought our groceries for about five years.
Every month, the Bodine Company would send us $50, $75, $100, $125, and was very—
you know, was a very useful thing to have. But that kind of started me in business.
Now I’m with the Grigsby-Grunow Company and trying to do something for GrigsbyGrunow, and I go now to the next radio show that’s at the Stevens Hotel, which is the
following year. And this was now the year of 1927, I think. ‘26 or ’27. ’26, it was. And I
see the Magnavox Company have a loudspeaker. And it is a real, honest-to-goodness
loudspeaker. It’s a dynamic speaker, as a matter of fact. And they’re making—
manufacturing this speaker out on the West Coast. And there’s a fellow by the name of
Austin Armer, A-R-M-E-R, who is the chief engineer and—combination chief engineer
and I guess he was a production man and then also the sales manager of Magnavox. And
�6
I sold him on the idea of giving me one of these speakers and to let me take it home and
hook it up.
And so I got a dry goods box, an old, wooden dry goods box, and I cut a hole out of it to
fit the speaker into it. And then I made up a—at this time, Madeline and I had moved.
Now we’re living out on 80th and Cottage Grove. And we had already had little Bill
Junior. And we did not as yet have our little girl, Patti. But we’re living out in this little
apartment at 80th and Cottage Grove. And out there in the apartment I built up this little
amplifier that was—consisted of a used UX199 tube, which was a very small rectifier
tube—a very small amplifier tube, and also a—it was driving a 210 power amplifier,
which put out about 10 watts, and it needed about 500 volts to drive it with. So I had a
big power pack to get the 500 volts from.
MOL: Excuse me, Dad, are we sure that it’s all right what he’s doing to the roof? [referring to
hammering sound in background]
WPL: I don’t know. So anyway, we got this—I make up this amplifier and rectifier and so forth
and put it all inside of this dry goods box with the speaker. And then I have a little
portable phonograph, and I have a pickup on the phonograph. And at that time, there was
a show on Broadway, and in this show on Broadway, they had a song—the name of the
show, I think, was Jubilee. And they—the song that they—that was the feature of the
show was “Sing Hallelujah.” And they had made a real Orthophonic recording of this.
And this was a wonderful record. It had bass in it for a change and pretty good fidelity.
And it would sing, “Hallelujah, hallelu—” How’s it go?
MOL: It was just like that. Almost. [laughs]
WPL: Almost, yeah. You see why I never got any place in the choir. So this—
MOL: Do you think—
WPL: And by the way, I think it was our friend that belted it out—
MOL: Fred Waring?
WPL: No, no. The gal that was married to Six, Bob Six.
MOL: Oh, Ethel Merman?
WPL: Ethel Merman. I think she really belted that one out. Sing it.
MOL: I’m not sure it was her.
WPL: Well, anyway.
�7
MOL: A wonderful song.
WPL: But it was a wonderful recording. And when I play this thing, why, this was one of those
happy combinations of where the resonance of the box, the resonance of the speaker, the
finest of the amplifier and everything made a wonderful, outstanding combination. It was
“Sing Your Blues Away.” You remember that?
[Bill and Moya sing a few lines]
WPL: That’s right. [laughs] So I now take this whole thing down. And I have an office right
next to Bill Grunow’s office. Now, Bill Grunow was a swashbuckling, dynamic, loudmouthed, profane individual that was tremendously successful as a result of his B-battery
eliminator sales and his A-battery eliminator sales. And, of course, I was sort of partially
responsible for the success of them by—for the success of them by solving the problem,
as I told you before, of this noise problem.
Well, now I’ve took and set this thing up in the office next to him, and I put this record
on, and this thing began to belt out “Sing Hallelujah.” And he came rushing into my
office. He says, “What in the hell is that?” And I said, “That’s a dynamic speaker.” He
said, “Boy,” he says, “that’s great.” And I played it for him a couple of times. And then
he had a chief engineer by the name of Kranz, Dr. Kranz, K-R-A-N-Z. Or Kran—yeah,
Kranz, K-R-A-N-Z or K-R-A-N-T-Z. And he had gotten Dr. Kranz from the Western
Electric Company. And he said, “Doc,” he said, “isn’t that wonderful?” And Doc Kranz
says, “Oh, I don’t think it’s as good as a Western Electric 36-inch cone,” which used to
be a kind of a big cone that you hung on the wall. And Bill Grunow, in his characteristic
profane way, uttered an epithet that—to the effect that he didn’t agree at all with
Mister—with Dr. Kranz. But it had to do with—something to do with horses and what
they do. [laughs]
So he said to me, he said, “Could you put that speaker in my Howard set?” The Howard
Company at that time were in existence, and they made home radio sets. And he had one
in his home. And he lived out in River Forest or someplace like that in an apartment. And
I said, “Sure.” So I went out, and I put one in his home set. And it took me—I think it
was the next afternoon I had it installed. And then that evening, he came home and I
played it for him. And he was just entranced with this thing. It was the best radio he had
ever heard in his life. And as a matter of fact, it what the best one I’d ever heard. So he
said, “Why don’t we make a radio set?” Or I think I said to him, “Why don’t you make a
radio set?” And he said, “Could you design it?” And I said, “Well, no, I can’t design it.
But I can find you someone who will.” Because I knew that he’d want the finest radio
that could be made, and I really wasn’t quite up to designing the exact kind of a set that
he wanted.
�8
So I then had seen a radio set that was designed by a fellow that was—whose name was
Kenny, K-E-N-N-Y, and who had formerly worked for the General Electric Company
and had now recently gone to work for the Sangamo Electric Company in Springfield,
Illinois. So I went down to see Kenny and try to sell him on the idea of coming up see
Bill Grunow. And Bill Grunow said, “Offer him anything that you have to get him.”
Well, I knew I could offer him—Bill told me I could offer him $25,000 a year. So I knew
that he was only making $5,000 a year working for the Sangamo Electric Company. So I
went down, and I said, “Come on up and see Mr. Grunow.” “Oh no,” he said. “I’ve just
come to work here, and I don’t want to make any more changes. And after all, the—
I’ve—cost me a lot of money to move my family from Schenectady down here to
Springfield, Illinois. And I’m just getting started, and I’m making a very good salary.” I
think he was making—no, he made $3,750 a year. That was it.
And I said, “Well, I’m sure that you can do very much better by going to work for Bill
Grunow.” And reluctantly he came up to Chicago with me that weekend. And Bill
Grunow couldn’t see him for some reason or other. He was tied up in something. And he
wanted him to wait over. Well, he wouldn’t wait until Monday because he had to be back
on the job down in Springfield on Monday. And it took an awful lot of persuasion to get
him to come up the next week. And he came up the next week, and so I told him—I’d
gone down to get him, brought him up, and on the way up there, I said, “Now, Kenny,
you can ask for as much as you want, and Mr. Grunow will pay you because I’ve given
you an absolutely perfect recommendation. I know what you can do. I know you can do
this job, and Mr. Grunow needs you. And so therefore you can ask for what you want.”
And I knew that he could get $25,000, but I didn’t want to tell him that because I thought
that if you could get him for a little bit less than that, it would be all to the advantage of
the company.
So when I got up to the plant with him, why, Bill couldn’t see him right way and waited
around for about an hour or so. And pretty soon Bill Grunow came into the office where I
had him, and he said “Kenny, I understand,” he said, “that you’re a radio engineer.” He
said, “Well,” he said, “I’ve been doing some radio work, and I’m a graduate radio
engineer—communications engineer.” “Well,” he said, “I’d like to hire you.” He said,
“What do you work for?” And Kenny said, “Well,” he said, “I’m making $3,750 a year
now, and I wouldn’t want to make a change—you know, I’ve just moved my family.” So
Bill is very impetuous, and he said, “I’ll give you $12,000 a year.” [laughs] And poor old
Kenny was just, you know, knocked right off his feet. If he’d have said, “I wouldn’t work
for you for less than $25,000,” Bill would have given it to him like that, you see. So Bill
made a deal with him there for $12,000.
Now, prior to this, Grunow had liked me so well that when I went to work for him he had
given me 2,500 shares of Grunow stock that was worth about a dollar a share and—just
�9
out of the goodness of his heart—or rather, just as part of the agreement for me to leave
QRS and come to work for him. And I had really diligently put forth my very best effort
for him. But he had some relatives working for him. They were kind of second cousins or
nephews or something like that. And one of them was an engineer in charge of the
manufacture of what they called the electrolytic condenser department. And this fellow
was bragging to me one day how he could get a million dollars for this—the know-how
on how to make this invention. And I told him, I said, “If you can a million dollars for it,
you ought to take it for the simple reason that there’s other people that know how to do it,
and if somebody’s silly enough to give you a million dollars, I think you’re stupid if you
don’t take it because it’s no secret.”
So evidently, this position that I had with Bill Grunow was one that kind of irked Mr.
Kranz, number one, and all of these relatives of Bill Grunow’s who realized that I was
right next to the top man. And despite the fact that I had demonstrated a loyalty above
and beyond by not taking the job as chief engineer but rather going out and getting a
better chief engineer for him in the form of Kenny, Grunow overlooked all this, and he
got me—just as soon as he hired Kenny, he said, “I want to see you.” So I went in his
office, and he said, “Did you or did you not offer Sims—” That was his nephew’s name.
“—a million dollars for the secret of how to make that condenser?” And I said, “No, I
didn’t, Bill,” I said. “Well,” he said, “he says you did.” And I said, “No, I didn’t.”
And so he brought Sims in then, and he said, “Did Bill offer you a million dollar—Did he
or didn’t he offer you a million dollars for that condenser secret?” And he said, “Yes, you
did, Bill.” [laughs] And I was so flabbergasted by this that it just took my breath away,
that a guy would stand up and lie to you right to your face, see. And I was so hurt because
I literally adored this big, old roughneck of Bill Grunow, and I just couldn’t fight back. I
just—I said, “If you believe that, then there’s no place for me in your organization.” I
said, “I think I’ve done everything for you that I could possibly do.” I said, “But if this—
if you believe this accusation,” I said, “obviously—” He said, “Well, you’re fired.” And
so I went out with my tail between my legs.
However, I had 2,500 shares of stock, which went to—it went to $20—let’s see—$25 a
share, and I sold it. And I was pretty well off as a result of that. But finally that stock
went to $1,600 a share.
MOL: Oh, goodness.
WPL: If I’d have held that until it went to, we’ll say, $1,000 a share, just think. I’d have had
two-and-half million dollars, see. But who—
MOL: Is Bill Grunow still living?
�10
WPL: No, Bill Grunow died. Bill Grunow, by the way, I was—his attorney was Joe Golde, who
was my attorney.
MOL: Is that so?
WPL: And Joe Golde—see Grunow, as a result of going into the manufacturing business—that
is, the radio business, made this radio set that was called the Majestic Radio. And he had
two models. He had a small Lowboy and a Highboy. And the Lowboy sold for $149.50,
and the Highboy sold for $189.50. And they were so popular that distributors would line
up outside of the—of his door with the cash, rolls of cash in their hands, to get these radio
sets. And Bill Grunow paid off his debts by giving the manufacturers this no-good stock,
see, that went to $1,600 a share. And there were many multimillionaires made as a result
of the fact that he couldn’t pay his bills, but he paid them off with this lousy stock, see,
which really went clear out of sight. They was split four times. It went to 100, and then it
was split, and it went to 100 again, and then it was split, and then it went to 400, see. So it
went up to $1,600 for the original share. [unintelligible]
MOL: Did you ever get your differences with him straightened out?
WPL: No, I tried, but I never could because later on, this fellow Sims came to me and said, “I
hope you know that I was forced to lie to Mr. Grunow.” And I looked him in the eye, and
I said, “I don’t think any man is ever forced to bear false witness against someone else.
And as far as I’m concerned, you’re about as low as anybody could be. And I don’t even
want to discuss the matter with you.”
MOL: Why would he be forced?
WPL: Because of this chief engineer, this Kranz, who literally hated me because I had, you
know, brought this stuff to Bill Grunow. And I brought this new chief engineer in, plus
the fact that I had solved these problems, you see. And I was Bill Grunow’s favorite boy,
you see. And I was making more than any of them. So they just were out to get me and
especially these little relatives who were real little bastards. And they just said, “Well, we
were forced to do that, see.”
So anyway, Bill—Smitty was working for them, and he also told me that it was a put-up
job. They had to do this. Well, it kind of broke my heart because I loved this guy so much
and I—and it was just a grand opportunity for me. But then I went over, and I went to
work then for the—Tyrman, Ernest Tyrman. And Ernie Tyrman was making the first
shield grid radio superheterodyne. But Ernie was a much—he was a much better
salesman than an engineer. So I had to take over and engineer his set for him. But we
worked side-by-side, and we worked very well together.
�11
And the man that owned the Tyrman Electric Company was Bob [Fishel?]. Bob [Fishel?]
was a Jew that was principally in the advertising business and that he made advertising
displays, conceived and made advertising displays. And his principal account was the
Sheaffer Pen Company over in Iowa someplace. And he was using his money to back
Tyrman and this Tyrman Electric Company. And I went to work for him.
Now, Tyrman and I were working night and day on this Tyrman superheterodyne using
shield grid tubes. And there was only one company in the country making shield grid
tubes, and that was the—a company known as Diamond Vacuum Products Company out
on Division Avenue. And the man in charge of Diamond Vacuum Products Company
was George P. Loring
And Loring was a very dynamic salesman. Later on, I went to work for George Loring—
or previously I had worked for George Loring. I don’t remember when it was. And I’ll
never forget George Loring, as he taught me—he went—I went around the country with
him once, and he showed me how to sell vacuum tubes. And then I went—oh, this was
prior to the time that I married Madeline, I worked for him. I was in Chicago, and I had to
have a job, and I went to work for him. And as I was going out the door with my sample
case in my hand, he said, “Bill,” he said, “so now you’re a traveling salesman.” I said,
“Yes, sir.” He said, “Just remember. You are a salesman and not a traveling man.” And I
looked at him and opened my mouth, and it dawned on me what he meant because he
meant I was to sell and not to travel. Because so many traveling salesman thought that
traveling was the answer to their job instead of selling. And I tried my darndest to sell the
tubes, and I did a pretty fair job of it, but not outstanding. But I did a fair job.
So that now, when I went to work for Tyrman, I had had a previous connection with
Diamond Vacuum Products, and they were the only ones making this shield grid tube.
And this was in great violation of all the RCA patents and so forth, and in those days,
patents were something that were absolutely holy. And your idea when you violated a
patent was that, in the middle of the night, why, the gendarmes would come and grab you
out of bed and thrust you into jail and leave you there to rot for the rest of your life if you
ever violated a patent, see. [laughs] And this was—these patents were the big RCA and
the big General Electric and the big Westinghouse and the big—let’s see. There’s
Westinghouse, General Electric, RCA, and one other. I forget who it was. But they were
the—oh, Western Electric. And by God, those four companies really had in the palm of
their hand the absolute control of everything that was radio, electrical, and so forth.
So this little Diamond Vacuum Company was making these tubes, and we were making
superheterodynes. And there was no such thing as getting a license from RCA because
RCA was going to sue everybody and put everybody out of business, see, that was
making radio sets. And Bill Grunow told RCA to go to hell, and so we at Tyrman told
�12
them, and we made these radio sets.
Now, Tyrman and I had exactly the same trouble, and that is we had a terrible burning in
our chest before meals that could only be quieted—a pain, you know, that could only be
quieted by eating. And then after we would eat, for half an hour we didn’t suffer, but then
after that, then we were worse off than we were before. And it was kind of an ulcer
situation. And so we both had the same doctor, and we decided that we’d get operated on
because they doctor said the only way you could cure it was to operate—an operation.
And so Ernie went and had his operation first, and he died. And I thought, “Well, that’s a
hell of a cure.”
So I decided to look for another cure than that and began reading up on what makes
ulcers and so forth. And one of the things I discovered in reading on it was that citrus
fruit, despite the fact that it seems to be very acid, that it leaves a residue in your system
due to the burning of the acid in your system of an alkaline ash that turns your system
alkaline. That you eat citrus, which is acid, but it turns ultimately your system to an
alkaline condition. And I knew that I was hyperacidity because, in taking a Litmus paper
test by putting it on your tongue, it would turn the paper blue instead of pink or whatever
it was. And I knew that I was acid, and I had to become alkaline.
And so I had never eaten oranges. I had never eaten grapefruit in my life. So I decided
that I was going to try orange juice and grapefruit. And I started on it, plus the fact I
started to drink Vichy water.
MOL: Honey, it’s ten to 11:00. You said you’d be at the bank at a quarter to 12:00.
WPL: No, I’ve canceled that.
MOL: Oh, okay.
WPL: So I was going to drink Vichy—I got Vichy water. And the reason I started drinking
Vichy water, which is a—Celestins-Vichy was because of the fact that I thought, “Well,
now here is alkali in perfect colloidal suspension because no matter how long you leave
Vichy water set, it never settles. So it must be in perfect—there’s nothing settles out of
the water.” So I thought, “Well, this would be one way in which I might be able to induce
some of the alkali into the bloodstream.” And this was in 1926 or ’27, and today it’s still
basically—the thoughts that I had at that time have finally been established. And by
going onto this diet, I completely rid myself of this terrible, terrible pain. And now, as
you know, every day of my life I drink orange juice or eat an orange.
MOL: We eat an orange, and we have a cup of coffee every morning.
WPL: And this has controlled this superacidity or these things that—poor old Tyrman was
�13
operated on and died. And I decided to go the other route, and since that time I’ve never
had any stomach trouble of any kind. I’m knocking on wood now, namely my head.
But anyway, now after Tyrman died, I had to take over the total responsibility for the
engineering of this product there. And as I say, this was in ‘26 or ‘27. Bob [Fishel?] was
a great guy, but finally I decided to go into business for myself. And I left Bob. And
during the time I was with Bob, I had borrowed $1,000 from him for something, and then
I felt that I had worked enough overtime and done enough special things for him that the
money was mine. But I had signed a note, and he wanted his $1,000. So he sued me for it,
and I retained—I think that was the first time I retained Phil Golde—or Joe Golde to
defend me. And he was unsuccessful in defending me because it was obviously that—
obvious that I owed him because it was a judgment note. So he just went in and got
judgment on the thing, and the court said, “You pay it.” So Joe Golde told me, “Well,
you’ve got to pay the note.”
So I got my $1,000 together and went over it with a check of $1,000 and a bottle of
whiskey and put it on his desk and—on Mr. [Fishel’s?] desk, good old Bob [Fishel?]—
and as I—he was a kind of a tough guy, too. But as I put this on his desk and—I put the
check on his desk and then give him this bottle of whiskey, he looked at me and he said,
“What’s that for?” And I said, “Well, that’s just thrown in for good measure.” And he
said—he grabbed the check. He tore the check up. And he said, “Don’t you understand
the reason that I sued you is because I wanted you to understand that you owed it to me? I
don’t want $1,000.” And he never took the $1,000. Just tore the check up. And we drank
the bottle of whiskey together. But he was—you know, sometimes you hear some nasty
things about Jews, but he was a really a wonderful guy in that respect. He had a real big
heart in him.
And then I left him. I went out, and I started this Lear Radio Laboratories in my
basement, which was at—I now had moved into—from Cottage Grove, I’d move over
into Mother’s house, and Mother and Otto had now gone back again to the farm. And I
moved into it, and I had the whole basement now fitted up as a shop. And I spent all my
time down there designing radio sets and working on—I decided that I would make radio
coil and—I would make radio coils, but in order to make the radio coils, I would have to
make a kind of wire that was not then available, which was litzendraht wire. And—
MOL: Have we passed the automobile radio or did you do that?
WPL: Oh, this is before the automobile radio. So I get ahold of a fellow by the name of Don
Mitchell. Somehow or other, I ran onto him. And Don Mitchell worked for the Santa Fe,
and he was a sort of a serviceman for the automatic signaling devices at the Santa May—
Santa Fe had installed to prevent head-on and rear-end collisions, which was very
�14
successful, as a matter of fact. The Santa Fe has had very few accidents on their road
because of the installation of this signal system. And he worked with me, and together we
developed not only the wire and the machines to make the wire, but we also developed
the machine to wind the wire and make the coils.
Now, there was a textbook that everyone used at that time in radio, which was Morecroft.
And Morecroft had a complete, basic explanation of all of the phenomenon of radio. And
one of the things that Professor Morecroft had said was that litzendraht wire was only
good to about 1,000 kilocycles and above 1,000 kilocycles it wasn’t any good. And here,
the range that we had to go was from 550 kilocycles on one end to 1,500 kilocycles on
the other end. So obviously, this wire wouldn’t be any good. But I didn’t know that, so I
made up these little coils that were very small coils. The smallest coils that were ever
made before, and they were one and one-eighth inches in diameter, and they were about
an inch and an eighth long. And prior to that time, no coil was considered to be a good
coil unless it was two and a quarter inches in diameter and two and three-eighths inches
long. And this was because in Morecroft’s formula for a coil, this made the best coil.
But all coils had to be shielded. And as soon as you put them in a shield, well, now the
efficiency went down so fast due to the large diameter and its increased size of the field
of the coil that this theory did not hold. But the average radio engineer didn’t realize that.
So when I came out with my small coils, I was able to outperform everybody else’s radio
by putting—taking anybody’s radio and putting my coils in them made that radio set a
better radio set. But before I could get into business really, I was—I needed some
additional money because I had—I always had the propensity of being able to spend
faster than I was able to earn, and I’m only exceeded in that by my wife. [laughs]
MOL: We make a wonderful combination.
WPL: So my champagne appetite had run away from me, and the money that I had made on the
stock and everything from Grigsby-Grunow was gone. And I had—
MOL: Had you bought your airplane?
WPL: Oh, no, I hadn’t bought an airplane yet. I had bought a couple of cars, though, and I had
paid off Mother—
MOL: What kind of cars did you buy?
WPL: Oh, I had a Durant, of course. A six-cylinder Durant was the fastest thing on wheels. I
could go 84 miles an hour with it. And I went 84 miles an hour most the time, too, four
speeds forward. [laughs] Anyway, I’d paid off the mortgage on the house for Mother, and
I was just—I was out of money.
�15
So I went out to—took—once more, I got ahold of my friend [Lawrence Sorenson?], and
we went out—I met a man by the name of [Algot Olson?]. And Algot was a cripple, and
he was crippled with arthritis so badly that his fingers were actually bent back at right
angles. In other words, these ends of his fingers were at right angles with his fingers from
the horrible crippling effect of this arthritis. And he had been a terrifically active guy in
his business. And as a matter of fact, when he stopped, when this thing hit him overnight,
it took 13 men in this business to replace him, he had been so active.
And he was a wonderful old Swede. And he had a nice family, and he lived out on the—
he lived out in the west—southwest side of the city. And I had gone out to help him with
his—building radio sets. And he loved to—he loved me. He loved to be with me, and I
loved to be with him. And this great man, when he was stricken, couldn’t move any part
of his body, and the only thing he could do was open and close his eyes. He was
completely, helplessly stricken, and the doctor told him, he said, “Algot, I know that
you’re the kind of a man that wants to know the truth. And you can’t live.” And Algot
just wouldn’t accept that as a final answer.
And as a matter of fact, he not only lived, but he got so that he could use these horribly
crippled up fingers to put little screws and nuts and bolts together, and he made radio sets
just for his own amusement. He was very wealthy. And he had—I think he’d been in the
lumber business or something like that, and he had stock in a lot of banks around there,
and he was just very well off. A very nice family. He had a daughter and a son, and he
had a home out in Cedar Lake, Indiana, a beautiful home. He had a motorboat. He drove
the motorboat, drove his cars, golfed, rode on a horse. Also, he would build these radio
sets.
So when I got a little short of money and I wanted to make this wire, I went to him and I
said, “Algot, I’ve got an idea that I want to do something about, and it’s going to cost me
some money. And I need to borrow $5,000.” And he sat on his lawn swing out there in
Cedar Lake, Indiana, listened to me tell about how I was going to make this machine and
how I was going to put the spools on the machine and how the—I was going to have a
table, and a table was going to rotate, and that was going to turn the strands of the wire.
And then I was going to have another thing that was going to wrap these strands
around—the silk around the wire and so forth and so on.
And he sat there and listened to me kind of disbelieving. And finally when I got all
through and told him what I was going to—then I was going to make a machine to make
coils and to use this wire to make coils with and so forth, he kind of—well, he first of all
started to chuckle, and then he really began to laugh very hard. And I became incensed
because I said, “Mr. [Olson?], I don’t like to be laughed it. I’m serious.” And he said,
“Look,” he said, “I’m really not—” He said, “I’m laughing at you because you are
�16
serious, but not because of—I’m not laughing at you as much as I’m laughing at myself.
Because I can remember when I was your age, when I was so full of vim, vigor, and
vitality, and I thought that’s something that I was going to work on was definitely going
to work. And I know you believe this thing is going to work.” But he says, “I don’t
have—” He said, “I would bet you all the tea in China that the thing won’t work the way
you think it’s going to work.”
And I said, “Well, I’m sure.” He said, “Sure,” he said, “I know you’re sure. But,” he said,
“it just—it won’t come out that way. It never does.” He said, “But in spite of the fact that
I don’t believe it will work,” he said, “I’m going to loan you the money.” He said, “Not
based on the fact that you’re going to make money out of this thing that you’re going to
do, but I think that you’re basically and morally honest and that you will pay me back out
of the sweat of your brow.” He said, “I don’t expect you to take the—I don’t expect you
to take the bread out of your children’s mouth to pay me back.” But he said, “After
you’ve spent this money,” he said, “then,” he said, “I think you’re going to find that it
doesn’t work and,” he said, “you’re going to get a job.” And he said, “If you’re making
$100 a week,” he said, “I’d like you to pay me back $5 or maybe $10 a week.” And he
said, “But just pay me back,” he said. “I have no confidence in your scheme being a
success, but I’m going to back it.”
So he gave me this—a loan of $5,000, which he was wise enough to give me in dribs and
dabs. He gave me, I think, about $500 at a time. And before the $5,000 was spent, I had
built, I think, 12 or 13 of these wire-making machines, and I had also built a machine to
wind the coils. And when I had this and had it in operation, he used to come around—and
I had all these machines in operation in my garage—he would come around, and he
would sit and watch these machines that ran night and day. And he would just chuckle
and chuckle and chuckle to himself because he thought this is the most wonderful thing
he’d ever seen and this was a wonderful way to make money because the longer these
machines ran, the more money I made.
And I was actually able to sell litzendraht wire to people, and I was able to sell these
coils. And the first coils I sold, I sold 50,000 coils to the Zenith Company. And the way I
sold those coils to the Zenith Company was by demonstrating to Mr. McDonald [Eugene
McDonald]—they called him Commodore or Commander McDonald because he was in
the Navy at one time, and he had a big boat out in the lakefront, and he was a kind of a
wild guy. And he was the head of the Zenith Company. But he was pretty sound.
And he had a fellow working for him by the name of Karl Hassel. And Karl Hassel was
an engineer, and Karl had designed the Zenith radio. And I had taken one of the Zenith
radios and put my coils in it. And Karl didn’t believe in my coils at all, but I had gotten
Karl Hassel and McDonald to come out and listen to one of their standard sets working
�17
alongside of my set. And, of course, Karl Hassel was tuning his set, and I was tuning my
set that had my coils in it. And the only difference between the two sets were the
difference in the coils. And despite the fact that Karl Hassel said that, according to
Morecroft, these coils couldn’t be as good as the coils that he had in his set because they
were designed exactly like Professor Morecroft said they should be designed,
nevertheless, my set so outperformed his set that McDonald said, “Buy them.” And I got
an order from the Zenith Company for 50,000 coils, which put me in business.
And I then changed the name of the company to the Radio Coil and Wire Corporation,
and now it became—I was selling coils and doing very well. And I ran into a fellow by
the name of Stewart, who was making the Stewart battery eliminator, B-battery
eliminator, and also was making an A-battery eliminator. And he had sold his business
out to Paul Galvin of the Galvin Manufacturing Company. And Paul Galvin had heard
about me and had invited me down to talk to him. And I decided that I would go in
business with Paul Galvin, and I would give him the Radio Coil and Wire Corporation in
return for a third interest in the Galvin Manufacturing Company.
And so I got a third interest. Actually, I never received any kind of paper or anything like
that, but Paul says, “You own a third interest in the Galvin Manufacturing Company.”
And as far as I was concerned, I owned a third interest in it, see. We weren’t making any
money, so I didn’t see any reason to have any kind of paper to prove it. I wasn’t a very
good businessman, but I was technically much better than I was business-wise. As a
result, when the—finally, when the showdown came as to what I owned in the company,
I didn’t have a leg to stand on. All I had was his promise that I had—that I owned a third
interest in the company. And I realized that the best thing for me to do was to take
something in lieu of it, unless I wanted to start a great big suit, which I knew could only
end up one way and that’s losing, because I didn’t have anything in writing. It wasn’t that
Paul was dishonest, but in these things you forget what you say with a—as time goes on.
And especially if it’s convenient to forget, why, you can kind of put a block in your mind,
and you really can’t remember that you ever said something if you don’t want to
remember that you said it.
So in lieu of that, I took an arrangement with Paul that paid me a percentage in all the
business they did, plus a nice salary. And as such, I was chief engineer of the Galvin
Manufacturing Company and also of the Radio Coil and Wire Corporation, which was
now owned by the Galvin Manufacturing Company. And we designed chassis, which we
would sell to the various department stores, and the department stores, in turn, would put
these chassis in the cabinets of their own with speakers that they bought elsewhere. And
they would make up what they called leader-type of radio sets, which they would
advertise. They’d buy the chassis from us from $25 and buy the speaker for $10 and buy
the cabinet for $15 and sell the whole set for $79.50 or $89.50. And they’d run 200 or
�18
300 of these things at a time. Hartman Furniture Company—or Hartman Brothers in
Chicago was one of the places we dealt with. Wieboldt’s was one of the places we dealt
with. And we were in the radio chassis business.
And then I began making chassis for other people, and through the development of these
small coils, I found a market—at first we were just making radio frequency type of
tuners. In other words, we just tuned each stage at three stages, and you’d tune the stages.
And to tune in a station, you’d have to turn this dial to 12 and this dial to 12 and the other
dial to 12. And then finally, the superheterodyne began to be the rage. And I quickly
figured out how to make a cute little superheterodyne and went out to the West Coast,
and when I was at the West Coast, I made this superhet—I converted the—what they
called miniature radio set business that was going just completely wild at the West Coast
at that time into miniature superheterodyne [unintelligible].
Now, a miniature radio set in those days was a small set that was a table set. And in
general, it was about 14 inches wide and about 12 inches deep and about 18 inches high.
And it had a loudspeaker up at the top, and then down at the bottom was the tuner. And
these sets sold for, oh, all the way from $59 up to $99. And they were just selling them by
the thousands. And there was a Gilfillan Company and a Packard Bell Co—or the
Mission Bell Company and then which later became the Packard Bell Company. And
there was all kinds of radio outfits in operation. And Gilfillan had a real nice arrangement
out there in that they had one factory that they let a lot of little people—little radio
manufacturers manufacture in this big factory of theirs because they had an RCA license,
and as long as you made the chassis in this factory, then you were licensed under the
general Gilfillan license for radio sets.
And, of course, when I went out there, I changed all of these things around from a TRF,or
tuned radio frequency set, to a superheterodyne set through the use of my little coils. And
this generated a lot of business for Galvin. And I stayed there with Galvin until finally,
one day, I was—in my contact with the—with Zenith—they had another engineer in
Zenith by the name of Howard Gates. And Howard Gates suggested that, “Gee, these
small coils ought to make an awful nice little automobile radio.” And I said, “Gee, I’d
like to make an automobile radio. And I could design—” [audio malfunction] I said, “I
can design the set and give you the drawings. And you make up the metal work, and I’ll
make up the radio set and put the coils and the condensers and so forth on.”
And with that, why, we agreed we’d make up two sets, one for Howard Gates and one for
myself. So he—I designed it. He made up the metal work, and that meant punching out
the chassis and so forth. And then I made the—made up the two sets. And I went to—one
day when I got them finished—it only took about a week or so—I took them downstairs,
and I put them on Paul Galvin’s—I put one of them on Paul Galvin’s desk, and he said,
�19
“What is it?” And I said, “It’s a radio—an automobile radio set. He said, “Automobile
radio?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “You know what I think about automobile
radio?” And I said, “No, what do you think about automobile radio?” And he said, “Well,
I think that it’s horse crap.” He said, “Automobile radios will never be allowed to be put
in automobiles.” He said, “They’ll legislate against them.” And he said, “It will be—
they’ll never, never allow them to go in an automobile, see.”
And I said, “Well, you know what I think about what you think about automobile
radios?” [laughs] And he said, “What?” And I said, “Horse crap.” I said, “You’re just as
wrong as can be.” I said, “An automobile radio is a relaxation. And instead of it bothering
the driver, it will make the driver much less nervous. It will give him a chance when he
gets caught in traffic jams to listen to his favorite program. And I don’t think it’ll be a
dangerous thing at all.”
So anyway, Paul kept to his opinion, and I kept to mine. I delivered one of these sets to
Howard Gates, and I installed the other one in my car. Within about two weeks, Paul
Galvin came to me, and he said, “Say,” he said, “did you run a bill of material on that
automobile radio set you made?” And I said, “Yes, I did.” He said, “How much did
they—how much did it run?” I said, “$22.” And he said, “Well, let’s see. We sell it for
four-and-a-half times 22, that would be approximately $120. That’s 50 and 10 percent
discount. That would give us about $50. And we would be able to make them for about
$35. Make $15 a piece.” And he said, “Let’s make a couple hundred.” [laughs] So we
started in to making automobile radios. And as you now know, the Galvin Manufacturing
Company is the Motorola Company, and the Motorola Company made its big success in
the automobile radio business. So once more, I took a business to somebody that
blossomed out and became a tremendous success.
I continued to work for Paul for some time. And I began—at the same time, I formed a
separate little company called Lear-Wuerfel. W-U-R—let’s see. It was W-E-U-R-F-E-L
[sic]. And Bob Wuerfel was a real good radio engineer. He knew a lot more about radio
than I did. Ingenious as could be. And as a matter of fact, he was the one that figured out
the—the way in which to make a battery set that could operate either off of batteries or
operate off of the—now, let’s see. Let me see. No, he was the one that figured out how to
make a very small sort of portable radio set that was one of the first really miniature sets.
And it was a set about the size of five inches high and about six inches long and probably
about three inches deep. And this was an extremely tiny set for the times. And he figured
out a way to wire the filaments in series and to operate them off of a rectifier. And this
became quite an important invention, as a matter of fact.
And I was in business with him, and we had a year there in Motorola when we operated
as chassis manu—as chassis designers. Now, by chassis designers, I mean we made the
�20
guts of the radio set and—or we designed the guts of the radio set. And we sold our
engineering not only to Motorola but to four or five other companies. And we would get
25 cents a chassis for every chassis they made, and they were making—many of the
manufacturers we were dealing with were making from 50 to 150 chassis a day. And this
was bringing in some very nice income for Bob and I. Besides, I was making a nice
income from Motorola. But I would say that I was making between $25,000 and $35,000
a year.
And I remember at this time I had retained the firm of—rather, Joe Golde as my lawyer.
And when I formed Lear-Wuerfel, he formed it as a corporation. And then finally Bob
and I agreed to disagree, and he could buy me out or I’d buy him out. And I bought him
out. And he wanted to go back to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he did very well. And I
changed the name from Lear-Wuerfel to Lear—let’s see—Lear Developments,
Incorporated. And under Lear Developments, I continued to operate for a long, long time,
possibly a year or so, in Motorola.
Now, at this time—well, the—rather, just as soon as I went to Galvin Manufacturing
Company, there was a fellow there that had a secretary, a real sweat gal. She was a—just
as sweet as could be and very quiet, didn’t say anything. She was a little blonde girl and
extremely efficient secretary. You could dictate to her, and she’d have the work done
neatly, beautifully, and completely in just no time at all. And so I was married to
Madeline. At this time, I had Billy and I had Patsy—Patti and—that’s Shirley Patricia
Lear and William Powell Lear, Jr.
But this little girl just looked awfully good to me. Oh, she was so wonderful, and I was
just so attracted to her. And Madeline and I weren’t getting along too well. We were
having our difficulties. I thought she was wrong, she thought I was wrong, and between, I
guess we were both very wrong. And I just literally adored this little gal because she—
first of all, I couldn’t reach her, and she treated me like as if I didn’t exist. She didn’t treat
me coldly. She just ignored me. And I was a very precocious, let us say, cocky little guy
that would—that wore kind of flashy clothes and was always hail-fellow—or tried to be a
hail-fellow-well-met. And this was the very opposite thing that she liked in a person. And
she just thought I stunk. And I was probably to her just like a little boy is trying to attract
attention by standing on his head.
But I got no place, and went—it just went for a year-and-a-half that way. And every
opportunity I could get to look at this girl or give her dictation or something else, I would
take that opportunity, but I was—she regarded me as nonexisting, so there was no
possibility of me reaching her. And this was a sort of a silent, secret love that went on for
about a year-and-a-half.
�21
And while Bob was still with me there, one night we were going out to the—I think it
was the River Forest or the Fox something-or-other Country Club. And I asked her—or
rather, I didn’t ask her, but Bob said to her—she was working late that night, getting
something done. He said, “Nellie, we’re going out to this particular country club.” He
said, “Why don’t you come along with us?’ And she says, “Okay.” And I almost fainted
because she knew that if she went along with me—Bob was married; he was going to
take his wife—and that she’d be my partner. And I was just in seventh heaven thinking
I’m going to be with this girl.
Well, I had never danced up till that time. We went out to this country club, and it was
kind of a speakeasy. And so there were was gambling in the place, and there was dancing
in the place and food and drink and so forth. So I asked her to dance—or no, she asked
me to dance—or rather, she said, “Don’t you dance?” And I said, “Oh, I’ve never
danced.” And she said, “Well, come on. I’ll teach you how.” So I got up, and I danced
with her. And I must have been really something because she said, “Now, quiet down,
you know. Don’t hop up and down, you know. And don’t sway your shoulders and—”
You know, she got me so that at least I wasn’t doing all the wrong things on the dance
floor. And it’s kind of laughable now because I’m supposed to be a pretty fair dancer
now. But at that—in those days, I just didn’t have any knowledge or any—I had never
had any opportunity to dance with a girl, and to me, I was shaking like I was shaking for
the drinks when I was on the floor.
And this was the start of the Nellie episode in my life, which was a very sweet and
wonderful episode. And as a matter of fact, when I was there in—let’s see. She went to
work for me as secretary. And finally when we moved to New York, she came to New
York as my secretary. And I ran out of money, and the only way I could pay her was I
gave her some of that bum Lear stock. I gave her about 10 per—let’s see. I gave her
about 10 percent of the company, which was worth nothing. And as a result of that, today
she’s the second largest stockholder in Lear and extremely wealthy in her own right. And
still unmarried and still a great gal. I think if I ever needed anything, I could—she’d give
me every cent she has, which is, I would say, considerably more than a million dollars.
But anyway, there we were in Paul Galvin’s fifth floor at the—847 West Harrison Street,
the Galvin Manufacturing Company. And I got sick and tired of working for the Galvin
family because he had a brother by the name of Joe Galvin, who was—God rest his soul,
he was a really—when he got drunk, he was just a mick. Now, Paul Galvin was a real
wonderful Irish gentleman, and his other brothers were all gentlemen. One was a banker
and a—I don’t know what the others were, but they were all fine people—and Joe was
also very fine when he was sober, but as soon as he’d take a couple of drinks, he would
become a typical, brick-throwing, coat-swinging Irish mick. And he just couldn’t hold his
liquor. And one time, he came out of a club drunk, and he drive—drove off the end of
�22
Municipal Pier. How he ever did this nobody knows because it was almost impossible to
do such a thing. And he couldn’t swim, and despite that fact, why, he got out of it without
any scratch. And I said to him later on, I said, “Gee, Joe, you were sure lucky to get out
of that thing not being able to swim.” He said, “Who can’t swim? He said, “I
demonstrated that I can swim.” [laughs]
[telephone rings]
[audio break]
01:00:23
[Aviation experiences and memorable flights; personal life in Chicago]
WPL: Well, finally, I decided to buy an airplane after I had been taking some flying—no, I
hadn’t taken any flying lessons, but I went and I bought a Fleet. And I bought this Fleet.
It was a biplane, wonderful airplane for its time, with a Warner engine in. And I went
over to Detroit while I was still there in—working for Galvin—or in the Galvin plant.
And I went over to Detroit to buy it, and I got it for $2,500 from a woman. I forget what
her name was, but she was a flier there. And Henry Ford let her keep it in the Ford hangar
at Dearborn. But before she was sell me the airplane—she loved this airplane so much
she had to—despite the fact that I took cash over there, she wouldn’t let me take the
airplane away until she’d investigated me. Now, you’d think if I had taken a check over
there, she’d have wanted to investigate to see if the check was any good, but I had cash.
So she said, no, she wouldn’t sell the airplane because she wanted to make sure I wasn’t a
bootlegger. Because obviously anyone that had that much money must be a bootlegger.
And so I had to produce credit references and so forth. And after she looked into it, well,
then she said she’d fly the airplane over for me and deliver it to me in Chicago if my
references were all right. [laughs] And so this is the way I got my first airplane.
And then I hired a fellow by the name of F. L. Yeomans, FLY—[laughs] they call him
the Fly Boy—to teach me to fly that airplane. And so he gave me about two hours or two
hours-and-a-half of flight instructions. And then one Wednesday afternoon, I went over
and got the airplane out of the hangar and took it off of Municipal Airport and flew it
over to this little field that I had gotten many an airplane ride previously at Ashburn Field
and landed there about five or six times. And I came back and landed at Municipal
Airport. And at that time, as I said before, Municipal Airport was only a half a mile by a
half a mile in size, whereas it’s now a mile by a mile. And anyway, I put it in the hangar.
And I kept it in Roy Hill’s hangar. He was then manager of the—the Chicago manager of
the Air Associates.
�23
Now, remember, Roy Hill was the man that I had mentioned before as being with the
Bodine Electric Company. Now he had become associated with the operation there in
Chicago where they’d built a hangar right on the airport, and it was called Air Associates.
And I think Air Associates are still on the Chicago airport. And they sold airplane
supplies and also operated this hangar.
Now, at the end of the week, why, Mr. Yeomans came out. And he could only give me
flying time at the end of the week because he worked during the week. And so he came
out on Sunday, and he was going to give me some flying—more flying time. And I said,
“Do you think I can solo today,” after he’d flown me around for about an hour. And he
said, “Oh, I think so.”
So he flew me around for an hour, and then I—he gave me the airplane to take off,
despite the fact it was a little gusty. And he ran in the hangar, and he said, “Come on
out.” He said, “Bill Lear is soloing.” So they said, “What do you mean he’s soloing?”
And he said, “Well, he’s up now. He’s flying all by himself, see.” So they said, “Well,
you’re a little bit behind the times because he soloed Wednesday.” [laughs] And when I
came down, he had a sort of a wry expression—smile on his face, and he said, “What’s
the idea of kidding me?” And I said, “What did I do?” He said, “Well, you soloed
Wednesday. You didn’t tell me about it.” He said, “I made a fool out of myself.” He said,
“I ran in and told them that you were soloing, and they said, oh, you soloed Wednesday.”
[laughs]
So I soloed when I had about two-and-a-half hours of flying time. And that was my first
airplane, a Fleet. And I few that airplane to Florida and back and to New York and back.
And on one of my flights to New York, I took Yeomans along with me, and we—but I
told him he could go along, but I would do all the navigating, I would do all the flying,
and I would do all the landing and everything else, but just want him along in case I did
something absolutely wrong. Well, he had never gone across country like that before
himself.
MOL: Okay.
[audio break]
[brief music clip]
WPL: So it was the blind leading the lame and the lame carrying the blind. But the trip across
country was really something that you—I’ve got to tell you about because some things
happened on that trip that don’t happen normally on your first cross country trip. And it
was rather a hair-raising affair, but we did it. And by this time, Roy Hill had moved to the
New York hangar at Roosevelt Field with Air Associates, and I saw Roy in the hangar
�24
there and—
01:05:36
[End Side A]
[Begin Side B]
00:00:00
[brief music clips]
WPL: I’m starting this tape now with the story of my cross country in the Fleet and arriving in
Roosevelt Field and having the Fleet front win—or the windshield—or rather, the little
wind deflector that was over the top of the canopy repaired or replaced with—and
unfortunately, the Air Associates put in some different screws that were in there to start
with, and I’ll tell what happened as a result of that.
Now, Jean, this is another day. Day before yesterday was the last time I dictated on that
tape. Today is the 31st of March. It’s Thursday. Tomorrow, Friday, I am being paid, I
would say, a considerable honor by the—Air France, the airline Air France. They’re going
to bring a Caravelle here to Geneva just to give me the opportunity to see how well the
equipment that we have installed in the Caravelle is working, to give me a chance to
evaluate whether it’s working properly or not. This is a surprise to me. I thought I would
have to go to Paris and arrange my time to fit the convenience of Air France, but Air
France is so honored by—seemingly honored by the fact that I’m taking a personal interest
in their problems that they’re actually sending the airplane to me. And when you realize
that it costs $2,000 an hour to fly this airplane, you can appreciate that this is not an idle
gesture on their part.
As a matter of fact, I don’t want anything said about this at this time, but it—I have been
informed that as a result of the contribution that I have made and Lear Incorporated has
made to the benefit and welfare of France through the furnishing such a wonderful
autopilot for the Caravelle that there is a possibility that I will be received at the Hotel de
Ville in Paris by the Lord Mayor of Paris and that I will be presented with a Légion
d’honneur, or the Legion of Honor. This, of course, would be another accolade added to
the ones I’ve already received, most of which were very much appreciated, but I’m not
sure were deserved.
But nevertheless, tomorrow the airplane will be here, and I’ll have a chance to fly it.
Tomorrow also we’re going to have our meeting of the—all of the service representatives
�25
that we have in Europe. They’re coming from Sweden and from France and Italy and
Germany and so forth, and they’ll all be here for this meeting tomorrow to talk over their
problems and Lear Incorporated’s problems in furnishing the finest service of any
American company in the European area.
We’ll go on now with the story of our—my flight from Chicago to New York in my Fleet.
I think this was made in 1931. And as I said, I insisted on doing the flying all the way
there and doing the navigating. And one of the things that astounded me was the fact that
the Appalachian Mountains did not run north and south as I had always thought, but rather
ran from the northeast to the southwest. And this kind of confused me because I had a
tendency to keep turning at right angles to the way the mountain ridges ran, and this would
have taken me down to Philadelphia or Washington instead of into New York City.
There was a big thunderstorm as we got to Reading, Pennsylvania—or not Reading. It
was Easton, E-A-S-T-O-N, Pennsylvania. And I landed at the little station this side of
Easton and went in there, and some very nice people came out and gave us a ride into
town. And I’m not sure whether they put us at night or not, but I think they did. And the
next day, why, we—the thunderstorm had passed, and we went on from there on into
New York City and arrived at Roosevelt Field.
And while we were in Roosevelt Field—I was there for about three or four days—I had
the front—the windshield, which was just a sort of a little piece of plastic sticking up—it
was an open airplane, and this piece of plastic kind of kept the wind from blowing
directly into your face. And I had it replaced, and whoever replaced it put in some iron
screws instead of using nonmagnetic screws. And so three or four days later when I took
off to go back to Chicago, I was delighted to find that there was no difficulty at all in my
flying due west, which would—of course, was the necessary course to get to Chicago.
Finally, I found out that I could fly due west no matter which direction I flew. And, of
course, the reason for this was is that the compass was being attracted by the—the
compass that I was following in the airplane was being attracted not by magnetic north,
but rather by the magnetic screws that were located about six inches away from the
compass card.
And as a result I soon found that I was completely lost, and I had to land in a little patch
of ground, a little flat place, to find out where we were. And I successfully negotiated this
landing, which I don’t think I could even do today. And it was alongside of a school, and,
of course, when we landed, the school immediately let out. And all of the kids came
piling out and the teachers and everybody—it was a little country school—and swarmed
around the airplane. And I was afraid that they would pick it to pieces before I could get
out of there. But they were very nice, and they didn’t hurt the airplane any. And we
finally found out that we were north of our course and that if we followed this river
�26
valley, why, we would come into Williamsport, and then if we followed it a little bit
further, we’d come into Kylertown. And Kylertown was an airport that had gasoline.
And so we took off, and it was a rather harrowing, downhill, downwind take-off, but we
made it and got off the ground, got over into this little river valley, and followed it down,
despite the fact we were—the clouds were getting lower and lower, and I was getting
more concerned and more concerned. But our gasoline gauges were showing that we had
no gasoline, but obviously we must have had a little. And in general, it was a pretty
rugged situation.
But finally we saw this little airport show up underneath our wing and down we went and
landed at Kylertown and got some gasoline. And then we were able to make it all the way
back from Kylertown to Cleveland, and then we landed at Cleveland. We got some
gasoline there. This little airplane was a Fleet, and I only flew about 90 miles an hour, but
it was a fine airplane for the day, a good acrobatic airplane. And it was made by a man by
the name of Reuben Fleet. And when Rube Fleet finally ended up, he was in—he was the
man that really founded what is now the Convair Company down in San Diego and that
when he sold out his interest in Con—in the company that he’d founded down there, I
think that he got about $13 million in cash. And I think Rube Fleet is still alive and still
doing very well. But I don’t think he’s active in the aviation industry anymore.
Anyway, we took off from Cleveland, and we went to a little town that was between
Cleveland and Chicago. And we had a dickens of a time finding this airport because in
those days, there were no radio waves and you flew by pure navigation and you tried not
to get too far away from the railroad track. One of the interesting things about flying in
those days was that you always had to have twice as much gasoline as necessary to make
any particular flight, for the simple reason it always took, we’ll say, 50 gallons of
gasoline to reach your destination, and then it took another 40 gallons of gasoline to find
the airport because there was no definite way to find the airport except look for it
visually. And sometimes you’d fly over it two or three times before you’d recognize it as
an airport because they were all grass fields. And this little field there out in the middle of
Ohio was on this basis.
We finally found it and landed, and we gassed up. And I think we stayed overnight there,
and the next day we went back to Chicago. And this is my first cross country trip. It was
actually my first cross country trip, and I think that it was F. L. Yeomans’s first cross
country trip. But I had decided that I would do all the flying, and by gosh, I did all the
flying at that time. Now, this was in 1931, and I was still with Galvin Manufacturing
Company. I mean, I was with Galvin Manufacturing Company, and I was just getting
ready to leave them now and go into—no, Jean, I’m sorry. This was 1930. And it was the
�27
year after the Black Friday, when the stock market crash occurred, which was in the fall
of 1929.
And so now that I had this Fleet, I used it, of course, to enhance my romantic activities
and got little Nellie Hughes interested in going for a ride with me in my airplane and just
took her around the airport and down. And, of course, aviators in those days were more
or less swashbuckling, daredevil, death-defying individuals that took their own life and
their friends’ lives in their hands and went up and drove the airplane around the sky. So it
enhanced, we’ll say, the respect of one Nellie Hughes for one Bill Lear, and this was—
anything I could do to get this girl to like me a little bit better was certainly very
important to me because of the—what I told you before, she was so stand-offish and so
difficult to approach. And I think she still wasn’t terribly excited about me, except she
still—she was beginning to moderate just a little bit her derisive attitude towards me.
Now, I think finally I got her to go to work for me as my secretary when the man she
worked for, whose name was Gershon, G-E-R-S-H-O-N, and who came over to
Motorola—or rather, to Galvin Manufacturing as sales manager, having left the Freed
Company, where he was sales manager, the—of the Freed Radio Corporation. Finally he
left Galvin and went someplace else, and this kind of left Nellie kind of footloose and
fancy-free. So she went to work for me as my secretary.
At that time, I had working for me about three or four technicians or junior engineers.
And I had Nellie. And then on top of that, I had decided that I would build an apartment
for myself because I had become separated from Madeline and was living by myself. And
so I thought, “Well, I won’t get an apartment someplace, but I’ll just build one.” And on
the fifth floor of this old ramshackle factory—loft-type of factory building at 847 West
Harrison Street, I took and had constructed a very modern office, which, by pushing a
few switches and throwing a few handles, at night it became into a very modern living
room with an artificial fireplace and a big, beautiful, panorama window that looked out
onto the lakefront.
Now, of course, we were owhere near the lakefront. But it was probably one of the first
times that this had ever been done. I had gotten a photograph of the lakefront looking at
the lake from—as if you were in an airplane up over the lake, looking back towards
Michigan Boulevard across Grand Park from the lake, but showing the edge of the lake
and showing the—Michigan Boulevard and so forth. So it was just like as if somebody
was looking out of an apartment building that was about a half a mile out in the lake back
towards the Chicago Loop. And it was a beautiful, beautiful picture. And I had it blown
up to about five feet high and about seven feet long, and then I built a sort of a frame for
this with a deep window. There’s a—a sort of a deep frame, so that I could light it from
behind—or rather, put the lighting behind the frames so that the lighting now would
�28
appear on this picture. And I produced a very beautiful effect at night, where I could turn
off all the other lights in the room or turn them down and then adjust the brilliancy of the
lighting so that actually you get the illusion that you were looking out of a great big,
beautiful window at this lakefront scene. And it made a very impressive sort of a thing.
And in the daytime, I could convert this thing from a combination living room/bedroom
into a perfectly grand, big office. And then right outside of this, I had a very nice
secretary or reception office, and then on the other side, I had a complete kitchen
installed. And I had somehow or other gotten ahold of a little Filipino who was the most
amazing, wonderful Filipino cook and barman that you could ever expect to have. And he
could prepare the finest food out of nothing that I’ve ever taste in my life. I would come
in, and I’d say, “Peter, I have 10 guests.” And, you know, I’d bring them tromping into
this big old factory building, go back through this dark hall to the freight elevator, and
then up the freight elevator—crickety, crackity, crick, you know, a slow freight
elevator—to the fifth floor. And then take the big old gate and swing it down and—or
push it up and down so that people could walk out of the elevator.
And then they’d walk down past these production lines where we’d made our radio sets
and then up to the front of the building where it—on the one side, on the outside, it
looked like just a great big, old, rough partition. And then as you stepped inside, you
stepped into this beautiful, modern office and/or living room, whichever it was fitted up
to be. And it’s needless to say I had a barrel of fun in that office, and I don’t think anyone
in their right mind has ever had as much fun as I had there. And this went on for about six
or eight months or maybe about a year.
00:17:53
[Stories about the automobile radio business; transition to aircraft radio development]
WPL: And then finally, I decided that the automobile radio business was not a business for me
because it was—it got to the point of where you were involved in not just making good
radio equipment—
[buzzer goes off in background]
[audio break]
WPL: But also, that you were having to chisel pennies out of your suppliers in order to stay in
business. And for some reason or other, I got the idea that this was not particularly a good
thing to do, that you ought to be in some kind of a business that, you know, you didn’t
have to cheat somebody else or hammer somebody else down to the point of where you
could make a profit.
�29
I feel a little differently about it now, however, because this is just the exigencies—or
rather, the necessities of modern business, and that is that you buy at the lowest price and
sell at the lowest price and still end up with a profit. As a matter of fact, my philosophy
that I’m constantly expounding to my organization is that there is no reason in the world
for any company to be in business unless they can produce a better profit for less money.
And that means that we not only have to know how to put something together at low cost,
but we also have to buy at the lowest possible price that we can buy anything that is
necessary as a component of the piece that we are—or the final product that we are
making.
But in those days, I think I was more or less motivated by the fact that I was in Galvin
Manufacturing Company, and there was Paul Galvin and Joe Galvin, Paul being a
gentleman and Joe being a kind of a wonderful guy when he was sober, not too good
when he wasn’t. And in general, Joe wasn’t anywheres near the gentleman that Paul was.
And it was a family affair, and I felt that I just wouldn’t get anyplace as long as I was in
that kind of a setup.
So I finally went to Paul one day, and I said, “Paul,” I said, “I’m going to quit unless a
certain situation is remedied.” And he said, “Well, we’ll miss you around here.” [laughs]
And I was a little taken aback to find that I had issued an ultimatum, which he took
advantage of. And I guess I—he had plenty of good reason for that because I wasn’t
spending enough time on the—on his problems, as I was devoting my time now to
airplanes. As a matter of fact, I think the thing that brought it to a head was that, by this
time, I had bought a—not only did I have a Fleet airplane, but I had bought a
Monocoupe. And then the Monocoupe I traded in on a Stinson Reliant. And the Stinson
Reliant was made by the Stinson Airplane Company over at Wayne, Michigan, and I
think it sold for about $2,500 or $3,000, something like that. A wonderful airplane fourplace airplane, very good looking. Quite heavy, not very fast, but faster than my older
airplane.
[sneezes] Now, if you were here, you’d say santé, or if we were down in Munich, you’d
say gesundheit. And I would say danke schön. Or here, if you said santé, I would say
merci. But insofar as we’re neither place, I’ll say, “Excuse me.”
Anyway, I had bought this airplane, and as partial payment, I had given them—I think I
gave them 100 radio receivers for it and—no, it was $5,000. That’s what it was. And I’d
given them 100 radio receivers for it, plus my old airplane. So now I was in the aviation
business. And, of course, this was a business at first love. And the way I got into the
aviation business to start with was, of course, buying my first airplane. I wanted to be in
it because there was no business that I loved as much as aviation or nothing that I liked to
do—or let’s say the second thing I liked to do was fly.
�30
So I had gone through the first—the first of all, the Fleet. Then I got the Monocoupe, MO-N-O-C-O-U-P-E. And then after the Monocoupe, I’d gotten the Stinson Reliant. And I
had the Stinson Reliant, and I had flown it over to—let’s see, where was it—Fort Wayne,
Indiana. And I couldn’t get the engine started. There was just no way to start that darn
engine because it had a—I think it had a Continental engine in it. I’m not quite sure if
that’s the kind of engine it had, but it was seven or nine-cylinder engine, radial, and it
just—oh, it was a Jacobs engine, I think. But it just wouldn’t start. And the only way I
could get it started was, after a couple days’ time under this very subzero weather, we
finally had to take a woodstove and put it underneath the airplane and then put a tent
around the airplane and then get this woodstove going real hot and heat up the whole
damn engine. Then it started very easily. But up until that time, you could crank it and
crank it and crank it and crank it and it never would start. Now, we know now what was
wrong, but in those days we didn’t know.
So I had gone for two or three days that I shouldn’t have been gone, and by the time I got
back, poor old Paul Galvin was plenty well irritated with me. So the important thing was
that when I delivered some kind of a silly ultimatum to him, he said, “Well, we’re going
to miss you, Bill.” And this meant now that I had to move out on my own and start my
own—really get going without the help of Paul Galvin and Motorola—or rather—we had
named the Motorola set. As a matter of fact, Paul and I concocted the name Motorola on
one of our trips across country. We talked about all kinds of names, and finally Paul
decided that Motorola was the best of the names that had been suggested. And that’s how
the name Motorola was arrived at.
One of the interesting things that I saw recently as I was in the Motorola plant at Chicago,
and they have a radio set on exhibition there. And to show you how things get distorted
with time, it had a little—and this is without intention or without anyone trying to take
advantage of the situation. But nevertheless, there was a radio set, an old radio set in a
showcase. And then there was a placard in front of it, and it says, “The very first
automobile radio designed and built by Mr. Paul Galvin.” And I looked at it, and I
couldn’t help but smile because, number one, that particular set I am sure never saw the
Galvin Manufacturing Company. And number two, I had made—practically designed
practically the first eight or ten types of automobile radio sets that Motorola ever made.
And number three, Paul wasn’t a designer. He was businessman and a good one, too. But
it was interesting to me to see how this thing had grown.
And then when I kind of questioned some of people around there about it, they said, “Oh
yeah, this is—that was the first set. As a matter of fact, this man called up and said, ‘We
thought you’d like to have the first automobile radio set that Mr. Galvin ever made. He
made it especially for me and put it in my car, and I’ve had it ever since. And I don’t
want anything for it, but you can have it, if you’re interested in it.’” And so he brought
�31
the set down, and, of course, out of the goodness of their heart, they gave him a new—a
nice, brand new, wonderful new Motorola set, which was the nothing—I mean, this was
what they should have done.
But the funny part about it was was looking at that set, I know as well as I’m sitting here
that that set had no—was never made in the Motorola factory—or never made in the
Galvin Manufacturing plant. And I also know who it was that made the first automobile
radio set because I described that to you before. It was made by myself and Howard
Gates. And Paul was certainly not interested in radio.
Matter of fact, to go back just a little ways, one of the interesting episodes that happened
is I told you that Paul said, “Let’s make 100 radios—Motorola—or let’s make 100
automobile radio sets.” And we’d make them, but we didn’t—we hadn’t sold them. And
along came a fellow by the name of Cliff Thayer, Clifford Thayer, T-H-A-Y-E-R. Now,
Clifford Thayer was a handsome guy that was a natural promoter type. You know, you
run into these people that would rather—they would rather do something slightly
dishonest and make less money than do something that’s absolutely honest and make
more money. And he happened to be one of those types that always had a deal for
something.
He came in, and he said, “I can sell 100 of these radio sets for you.” Or, “I want to buy a
100 of your radio sets.” We said, “Well, what’s—we’ve got them.” And he said, “Fine.”
He said, “Now here’s the way I want to buy them.” He said, “I’ll buy them, and I’ll pay
you for them within a very short time.” And suddenly he came back, and he wanted
another 100 sets. And so we made up another 100 sets for him. And he came back, and he
wanted a couple hundred sets. And lo and behold, we’re in the automobile radio business.
So finally we get curious, and we want to know, “Where you’re putting all these sets?”
And he said, “I’m giving them away.” So we thought, “How in the world can a man
afford to give away these radio sets?” And so when we looked into it, we found out that
this was a racket. And here’s the way the racket worked. You would come into this place
of business, and they had a sign out in front that said, “Automobile radios given away
free.” So you’d walk into this place of business—it was up on 19th and Michigan
Boulevard—and they would say, “Yes, that’s absolutely true. As a matter of fact, we not
only give away a radio set, but we will—all you have to do to get one of these is to give
away five—four more—no, five more.” That was right. We thought, “Well, my
goodness. If I all I have to do is give away five more sets, this is really duck soup.”
So you bring your car in, and you would have the—they’d put the radio set in your car,
and you’d go away very happy. And then you signed a contract, and this contract said
that you agree to get five other people to take radio sets on this same basis. But the basis
�32
was that for each set that you gave away, you got a 20 percent reduction in the price that
you were to pay for the radio, plus the installation. And the radio plus the installation was
about $140, you see. But if you could get five people to take it on the same basis that you
took it, well, then obviously you got your set for nothing. So you went out, and you got
your three or four friends or five friends to come in and get a radio set, too. And they
signed a similar contract.
And this went just fine except that some of the people neglected to get any more people
to come in and get radio sets for nothing. Now, a little clause in the contract said that in
the event that you missed any of the payments on this radio set, which were due—in one
month you had to pay 20 percent, the next month another 20 percent, and so forth—
unless you happened to give away another set. Why, then the whole amount became due
and payable at once, and you had mortgaged your car for the amount of the total, and
also, you had signed a right of replevin on the part of the fellow that sold you the radio
set to come and get your car. And this little fine print, nobody bothered to read that, you
see.
So after about two months, people would come down and their car would be gone, you
see. And they would say—they’d call the police department and say, “My car has been
stolen.” So the police department would begin looking for it, and the police department
would find the car in a used car lot someplace. They’d say, “This car was stolen.” And
they’d say, “Oh no, this car wasn’t stolen. This car was repossessed. As a matter of fact,
we bought it from the people that repossessed it.” And about that time, everybody’s car
was disappearing. They wouldn’t come to you and say, “Will you pay this bill?” They
didn’t want you to pay the bill. They wanted your automobile. And the law at that time
allowed them to just come in and take your automobile away from you without redress.
And then they would sell your car, which, we’ll say, would be worth $500, $600 dollars.
They would sell your car for the amount that you owed them. Now, obviously, there was
a less-than-arm’s-length transaction taking place between the guy who was selling it and
the fellow that was buying it, so that your $600 car would be sold for $140, which you
owed them for the radio set that you’d gotten because you had forgotten to get five more
people to take radio sets from them on the same basis that you had taken radio sets.
Well, you can see how this thing—just at first, everybody thought, “Oh, this is absolutely
grand. You get a radio set for nothing.” And then in the long run, they found they had lost
their cars. And all hell broke loose when this occurred, and yet these people had a perfect
legal right to go in and take your car because you had given them mortgage on the car
and then they had gone through the process of selling the car at auction. Of course, you
knew nothing about this. By the time you got to your car, it was gone.
�33
Well, of course, that really caused a correction in the laws of—of the replevining of
automobiles to the extent that, first of all, the owner has to be made aware of the fact that
his car is going to be put up for auction, and he has the right to pay off the bill before it’s
put up for auction. But these fellows that were doing this were making five or ten times
the amount of money. See, for instance, they would pay us $50 for the radio set to start
with that they sold for $140, and then they would recover their automobile and sell the
automobile—we’ll say, they’d recover it for the radio set and then sell the automobile for
$300, so they were making enormous profits.
Well, this ended up with being exposed as a racket, and it was put in the newspapers and
so forth. And although Galvin Manufacturing nor ourselves were ever involved in the
thing—we didn’t know what was going on, except that we were selling a lot of
automobile radio sets—that was the start of the really successful automobile radio
business that turned out eventually to be Motorola. I thought you’d be interested in that
angle of the thing because that should be put into the book because it’s an absolute fact.
Now, anyway, after Paul and I had ceased our relationships, I went—I moved out to the
Curtiss-Reynolds airport at Chicago, which was on the far northwest side. And the
Curtiss-Reynolds airport was one of the airports that was owned by the Curtiss-Wright
Aircraft Company, and the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Company was an enormous company
that had terrific amount of funds that had been paid into it as a result of the sale of stock.
And they owned airports all over the country, and they owned literally hundreds of
airplanes that they had bought. And they were in the airplane manufacturing business,
and they were in the engine manufacturing business, and they had all kinds of activities in
aviation. And one of them that they had was this airport, which was called CurtissReynolds Airport and which now, by the way, is the big Naval Air Station at North—I
think it’s called Northbrook Air Station at—where the Curtiss-Reynolds Airport was.
But the Curtiss-Reynolds airport at that time had a nice great big hanger on it, had a nice
run—a couple of nice runways, and it was only about—the airport itself at that time was
only about a half a mile by half a mile. And they had a nice building on it—or house. It
was a two-story house with about four or five bedrooms upstairs and a nice living room
and a dining room and a kitchen and den downstairs. And I rented this house and rented a
lean-to and a hanger for—oh, I’ll say probably it was $50 a month I paid for the lean-to
and the hanger, and I paid about $40 rent for the house. And that was where I lived and
where I had an enormous amount of fun because this house I kept open house at all times.
Matter of fact, that’s when we used to—it was during Prohibition, and in order to have
anything to drink, why, you just bought pure alcohol and you mixed it with an equal
quantity of distilled water, put in a few drops of juniper berry juice, and you had gin. And
so we would take these five-gallon bottles that fit in the water stands that you always had
�34
in the corner. When you wanted to get water that was purer than the water you got out of
the fountain, you would order one of these water stands, and when you wanted a drink of
water, you’d go over and you’d push this little button and you’d get your drink of water. I
think [Puratess?] now there in Los Angeles sells water this way now.
But anyway, one of these five-gallon bottles we’d fill half full of water, and then we’d fill
half full of alcohol, and we would put this juniper juice in and then tip the bottle upside
down. And when you wanted something to drink, well, you’d go over and you’d take
this—the gin out of the water cooler. And it was a very good way to hide your gin
because it was in—it was—everybody could see where it was, and yet nobody would
ever suspect that that was your supply of gin.
And, of course, we had some funny instances where people would take a drink that was
too strong for them, and then run over to the water cooler and fill a glass full of this stuff
they thought was water. And then they get half of it down before they discover they were
drinking pure gin. [addressing someone else] Who is it?
So then, as I say, we kept open house here all the time, and every night we would have
the gang gather there. And they were all fellows that flew and—around Curtiss-Reynolds
Airport was really the aviation center, the north side. And I had at that time, I then—
somehow or other, I had acquired another airplane. And I had now—let’s see now. Let
me just think what this was. I had a Fleet. No, I didn’t have a Fleet. I had the Stinson
Reliant, and I also had a little Monocoupe with a smaller engine in it—a Lambert engine
in it.
And at the same time, I had—Madeline had now—although we were separated, she was
living in the Flamingo Hotel on 55th and the Lake. And the Flamingo Hotel was one of
the wonderful, big, beautiful hotels that had been built—apartment hotels. But all hotels
were more or less in distress because they couldn’t get—people didn’t have enough
money to pay the kind of prices that were necessary to keep these hotels going. So as a
result, you could buy what they called due-bills, D-U-E dash B-I-double L-S. And duebills were where the hotel would pay off its advertising—the money that it owed an
advertising agency with a due-bill. And that meant that the advertising agency could use
the hotel facilities against the money that was involved in this due-bill. So we’ll say that
they advertise for 1,000 dollars’ worth of advertising, they would get 1,000-dollar duebill.
And, of course, the advertising agencies couldn’t use this due-bill, so they would sell it
for, we’ll say, for 50 cents on a dollar, 40 cents on a dollar. And I think I bought about
5,000 dollars’ worth of due-bills on the hotel for something like 30 cents on the dollar. In
other words, for—I bought 5,000 dollars’ worth for 1,500 dollars. And this enabled me to
�35
put Madeline and Billy and Patti so that they could live in style there at the Flamingo. At
the same time, it didn’t cost me much money.
And then I had these two airplanes. And at the same time, I got her an automobile, and I
had an automobile. And by the way, you might be interested to know that you could buy
a Chevrolet, a brand-new Chevrolet, completely equipped with everything from soup to
nuts, and by the time you got through haggling over it and delivered to you, it was
about—not more than $590 outside—at the showroom. And so she had one, and I had a
little Buick and so forth.
And this is the time when my mother was now back living once more in the house that
Madeline had moved out of at 30—out there on 65th Place, back in Chicago again. And
this is when my mother said to me that I was a source of terrible embarrassment to her
because of Aunt Minnie, this little [unintelligible] that was—had this propensity for
making people’s lives miserable. And she said, “Aunt Minnie says that—” And she says,
“I just don’t want to tell her because, after all,” she said, “she must be right. You must be
in the bootlegging business because otherwise how could you afford two airplanes and
two automobiles and have Madeline and the kids living at a fine hotel over on the South
Shore Drive and you living up there in that big house at the airport and so forth?”
And it was so—it was absolutely impossible for me to explain to my mother that I was
making money in the business that I was in, that I was a manufacturer, because she would
say, “Oh, what do you mean you’re a manufacturer? Why, Mr. Novak owns a radio store
right up here at the corner, and he can’t afford anything like that.” And, of course, Mr.
Novak represented the very peak of commercial wealth as far as my mother was
concerned. And, of course, this has always irritated me because I’d get so damn mad that
I—frustrated at being able to explain to my mother that I was a businessman, that I
wasn’t a bootlegger. But I can just see my little Aunt Minnie stamping her foot and
saying, “Well, you can never convince me that he’s not a bootlegger because anyway—
with all the money that he spends, nobody could make that in business.” And she used to
speak like a Gatling gun, she would speak so fast. And, of course, my mother didn’t
know how to defend herself against that. And furthermore, I think my mother really
thought that I was in the bootlegging business.
But anyway, this is now 19—it’s getting on towards 1932, and along comes Roosevelt.
And I’m still operating out of this little lean-to, and I’m making aircraft radio sets,
transmitters—not transmitters, but just receivers. And I’m defying the Western Electric
Company, the Bell Telephone Laboratories, the Westinghouse, and RCA at making
receiving sets because this is a little monopoly they’ve got all tied up for themselves. And
once in a while, I receive a letter from them threatening me. But I’ve finally come to the
point at where I think maybe I can handle this situation if it ever comes to a showdown,
�36
but I’m not any longer afraid that some policeman is going to grab me out of bed in the
middle of the night and throw me in jail because I’m violating their patents.
And at that time, no one was producing radio equipment for the private flyer. And as a
matter of fact, in order to supply the private flyer with radio equipment, it wasn’t a case
of selling your radio versus somebody else’s—there wasn’t anyone else’s—it was a case
of selling the private flyer radio equipment for a need that he didn’t even know he had.
In other words, if you would say to him, “You want to buy a radio set for your airplane,”
he’d say, “Oh, when I’m flying I don’t want to be entertained.” And you’d say, “No, no.
This is not for entertainment purposes. This is for navigation.” He’d say, “Well, how can
you navigate with a radio set?” And you’d say, “Well, you can use the radio beacons, you
know, the radio ranges that the CAA have installed. And you can take advantage of this
and fly across country.” He’d say, “What’s a radio range?” And then you’d have to go—
you’d explain to him that if he flew to the right of the range, you’d hear an N, and if you
flew to the left of the range, he’d hear an A. And if you flew in the very center of this
range, why, he’d hear a continuous on-course signal. And they’d shake their heads and
say, “No, I don’t want anything like that. I just—you know, I just look at the railroad
tracks. I don’t want any of those newfangled devices like that.”
And aviation was just as hardheaded about accepting new things and always has been just
as hardheaded about accepting new ways, modern ways to navigate and to fly as older
forms of transportation were to accepting new ways. For instance, I’ve always told the
story about the shipping industry—rather, the big ships. Finally, Fulton designed the
steamship, and then when he designed the steamship, why, they thought about the idea of
putting them on ocean-going vessels. But the sailors said—[addressing Bill Lear Junior]
Come on in, Bill. The sailors said, “What? Put a—”
[dog barks in background]
WPL: [laughs] “Put a steamer—a steam engine in my boat and expect me to go across the
Atlantic Ocean? Not by a damn sight. The only way I’d do that is if I had some of those
old, reliable sails.”
So for a long time, why, all we had was sailing steamships and—then, of course, as they
found out they could use a combination of sail and steam, they finally got to building
bigger and bigger ships. And finally the ships got so big that they took eight helmsmen to
turn the rudder because the rudder was so big to steer the ship. And then somebody
suggested to the captain that they put a steam engine on the rudder so he wouldn’t have to
work so hard. “And, oh, man and boy, I’ve sailed the seas,” said the captain. “And I want
the feel the feel of the helm in my hand.” He wasn’t going to let go of that helm because
�37
God knows that the machinery could fail. He wasn’t going to do that. Of course, he
forgot about the fact that he had eight men turning the wheels.
But finally, this reluctance was overcome, and finally, some real daring soul actually
made an oceangoing vessel without a sail on it. And I imagine that for a decade at least
he was considered the most foolhardy of men to want to venture out on the open seas
with one of those contraptions they called a steam engine, see. And then, of course, they
finally got steam engines to run the rudder. And you can imagine what it was when they
finally suggested to him to put automatic pilots on these big boats. “Man and boy, I’ve
sailed the sea, and I don’t want any automatic pilot sailing my boat.”
And then there was the time when they wanted to put direction finders—radio direction
finders on. And there’s a case in—there’s case after case in maritime history where the
radio operator who was operating the direction finder, in which the captain has absolutely
no confidence whatever, would come up and tell the captain. “I’m sorry, Captain, but the
radio direction finding signals I’m getting indicate that we’re almost on the rocks.” And
you could—above the roar of the surf that he was about to crash into, the captain would
scream and rage that, man and boy, he’d sailed the sea and he knew exactly where he
was, just as they were piling up on the rocks, see. [laughs] And this is many cases of this
in maritime history, so you see—
BILL LEAR JUNIOR:
Still the same with radar.
WPL: [laughs] That’s right. So as a matter of fact, just recently, with all radar equipment aboard
the Doria Andrea [Andrea Doria] and so forth.
BLJ:
Andrea Doria.
WPL: Andrea Doria and the other ship—
BLJ:
[unintelligible]
WPL: —why, they just decided to ignore the radar and plow into each other. So it’s no wonder
that I had difficulty selling receiving sets to the aviation—for the aviators of the day
because they couldn’t understand, number one, how they could use it, and number two,
they weren’t about to trust such a precarious means of navigation as that, especially when
they could always follow the railroad track. And, of course—
BLJ:
Man and boy.
WPL: [laughs] Of course, “Man and boy, I’ve followed the railroad track, and I’m not going to
try out one of those newfangled ways of going across country.” And I’ll give you more
later.
�38
[audio break]
WPL: Jean, that was my boy. Bill Junior came in, and we had to talk some business, and now
he’s on his way. So I’ll try to go on with this thing. I hope that you’re able to unscramble
some of this and get some information out of it.
Now, when the—this was about 1931 now, ’30—going on ’32. And as a matter of fact,
the—Roosevelt is now elected to—for the first time with an enormous majority. And
despite the fact that poor old Hoover had tried his best to do all of the things that
Roosevelt was able to do because of a recalcitrant, lame duck sort of Congress he had—
they opposed everything he tried to do, but when Roosevelt got in, why, they gave him
almost dictatorial powers. And, of course, there was quite a few bank failures. And I
thought, “Well, now may be the best thing for me to do would be to go down and draw
some money out of the bank because all these banks are failing. And it wouldn’t do any
harm to do a have a couple thousand dollars laying around.”
So I went down to the bank, and lo and behold, the people were in the bank all right, but
the door was locked. And I knocked on the door and said, “Hey, let me in.” And they
said, “Read the sign on the door.” And I read the sign on the door, and it says, “Bank
moratorium declared by authority of the President of the United States,” see. And I
shouted in, and I said, “Hey, I just want a couple thousand dollars.” And they just shook
their head and—[laughs] I had just gotten a great idea just about one day too late. The
day before I could have drawn out all I wanted.
So now during the bank moratorium, where everybody is flat busted for cash, but you
didn’t need any cash because everybody was in the same boat. The only thing you needed
cash for was to put a nickel in a telephone or to get on a streetcar, but outside of that,
your butcher gave you credit, your grocer gave you credit, and your gasoline man gave
you gasoline. And it was a great three or four days there where nobody had any money
and nobody cared very much because you didn’t need any. And during that time, why, we
had been getting our groceries from a place over in Glencoe, and they loaded our place
up with groceries, and we had plenty to eat. And we had plenty of gin in the gin bottle,
and the workers didn’t expect any money because they knew that the banks were closed.
And it was just—nobody seemed to be very concerned about the whole situation.
And one of the funny things that had happened is I had bet Nellie and a girlfriend of hers
$20 on something or other, and they had won the bet. And it was their two $20 bills that
we lived on all during the bank moratorium for the things that we actually needed cash
for.
Now, after it got now towards 19—I’m still out at Rose—at Curtiss-Reynolds Airport,
flying my airplanes every day. I’m having a ball every night with wonderful parties, and
�39
people would come in from—at all walks of life. I mean, from the Governor of Illinois’
nephew downward. The big people in aviation and in radio would come out to visit me,
and we just had a real honest-to-goodness fun time there for a period, up until the—I
think it was the end of ‘30—let’s see—the end of ’32. Let me just think now. No, it was
the end of ’33.
00:52:54
[Move to New York; stories about aviators]
WPL: And towards the end of ‘33, I decided that I would move kit and caboodle to New York.
And I had decided that New York was really my oyster, and I was going to see if I
couldn’t crack it. And so I had Reeder Nichols, who—Reeder Nichols was running my
little shop where we made these radios and repaired them and so forth for airplanes. And
he was assisted by about three or four other fellows, nice, wonderful boys. And we also
had Warren Knotts with us, K-N-O-double T-S. And Reeder Nichols, by the way, now is
the—one of the vice presidents of a big manufacturing concern, sort of a telephone
manufacturing concern over in Australia. And Reeder Nichols later was the man who
flew around the world with a good friend, Roscoe Turner, and the late Clyde Pangborn.
And Clyde Pangborn was the man who previously had flown from Wenatchee—or rather
from Japan to Wenatchee, Washington nonstop. And Wenatchee was his home. And he
had—there was Pangborn and I’ll think of the man’s name in a minute who made this
trip. He had flown all the way around the world to Japan, and then when he landed in
Japan, why, they got thrown in jail there because the Japanese were beginning to get up
in arms and they were beginning to have all kinds of secrets. And they had a real police
state at the time.
And while our great ambassador, Mr. Grew [Joseph Grew] was playing golf, why, our
Pangborn and Herndon [Hugh Herndon], H-E-R-N-D-O-N, were lamenting—or
languishing in jail in Japan and damn near got beheaded if it hadn’t been for just a—just
that the Japanese just decided to let them go on with their trip. And the Japanese told
them, “We’ll give you one chance to take off, and if you don’t make it and you come
back, we’ll cut your heads off.” And Pangborn figured out a way so that after he took off
he could loosen up some bolts in the landing gear and let the landing gear fall off. And
this reduced drag of getting rid of this landing gear. He might be able to make it nonstop
all the way from—[audio distortion].
[audio break]
WPL: One, two, three, four. All right, I hope it—I lost part of the tape there. But I’ll try to start
over again because there was some hum developed in the microphone. I hope it doesn’t
happen again. Anyway, Jean, I left off where Pangborn, who was one of the team of—
�40
Roscoe Turner and Pangborn was accompanied on the Around-the-World Robertson
Race by Reeder Nichols, who was one of the fellows that I—really ran my show for me
in New York and who was instrumental in finding the place that—in New York at 125
West Chapin Street. Let’s see. No, it was—yeah, I think it was 125 West Chapin. And he
had gone to New York during the time that I went to Miami.
I guess I thought that the best way to start out was to be really broke. [laughs] So I went
down to Miami in my airplane while my little crew went to New York to set up a shop in
New York, so that actually, when I arrived in New York City, I had no idea where my
new place of business was. But I knew how to find Nellie, and I knew how to find—if I
found her, I could find Reeder Nichols and also could find out where we were set up to
do business.
But on my way—to go on with the Pangborn story, Pangborn did get the landing gear
loose. One of the interesting things about that was that this fellow, Herndon, didn’t want
to go on this trip. He was really afraid of it. But Pang had told everybody he was going,
and in order to finance the trip, he’d gotten this fellow Herndon to go along with him,
whose family had a lot of money. And in order for the family to prevent him from going,
they finally made Pang sign away all his rights to the story of the trip. And he was never
to publish anything about the trip.
Well, one of the things he would have had to publish was the fact that, number one,
Herndon was a coward, and his family were even more afraid than he was. So when they
got into this trouble there in Japan—see, they’d gone all the way around the world in this
Bellanca. They thought, sure, they had just about lost their head because the Japanese
were very tough characters to do business with about that time. And they were beginning
to clamp down on all kinds of tourism, and anybody who flew an airplane over Japan
obviously was a spy. The military had taken control.
And when he got permission to do this takeoff, where they said, “If you miss on this time,
you come back, why, it’s going to—we’re going to cut your head off.” So Pang fixed it in
a ingenious way so that he could get out of the airplane and pull these bolts out and drop
off the landing gear and that would reduce the drag of flying the landing gear through the
air. And in that way, why, they would be able to possibly make it all the way to the
United States nonstop.
So anyway, they took off. And Pang was a pretty good flier. Herndon couldn’t fly for
sour apples, but—and also, when Pang said, “All right, now get down there and loosen up
those bolts,” why, Herndon said something to the effect that he wasn’t going to do it. And
Pang then made him fly the airplane, and he crawled down underneath the airplane—no
parachute on, of course, and out over the Pacific Ocean and pulled the bolts out and got
�41
rid of the landing gear somehow or other. I imagine it was a really precarious few
minutes there. Crawled back up into the airplane and then flew without autopilot or
anything like that, flew all the way to Wenatchee, Washington and was the first one to fly
across the Pacific.
And then, of course, when they went on this Robertson Tour later on between—where
they flew from England down to Australia—and they flew in an old Boeing 247, which
what the Boeing type of airline that was then used. It was one of the first fast airlines that
Boeing brought out and was a small airplane, about 15-place airplane—I think it was
about a 12-place airplane. And they had obtained one of these as surplus from one of
airlines, and they had it all fitted up. And we had built the radio equipment for it. That is,
Reeder Nichols and myself had designed and built the radio equipment and the radio
direction finder. And the story of that trip is a saga in itself. Reeder Nichols could really
tell that story with—I think most interestingly because he remembers and I’m quite sure
the details of it.
But one of the things that was interesting to me is that on the radio that we built in our
office there at 157 Chambers Street, the—oh yes, that was the address. It was 157 West
Chambers Street in downtown New York. And we had our office—I think it was on the
ninth floor, and it was just a small, small office, about the size of two—well, it was about
the size of a large living room for both offices. And in the—we had it divided in two. I
mean, the—there was two offices where there normally would have been one. And on the
one side, we had Nellie as the bookkeeper and secretary and my office, and on the other
side we had the little machine shop. And we took with us this wonderful Bavarian
mechanic that I had named Wehner [John Wehner], W-E-H-N-E-R.
And good old Wehner—I’ll think of his first name in just a minute—he was possibly the
best mechanic I’ve ever, ever seen in my life because he could make something out of
nothing. And he could use tools that were completely inadequate for the purpose, but he
would make them adequate by his ingenuity and the way he went about it. And he was a
mechanic of the old school, which you very seldom find anymore because the mechanics
today have to have such wonderful tools that the tools do the thinking for them instead of
them being ingenious and using the tools. But—oh, it was John Wehner. And I had
moved John from Chicago to New York, and John worked right around the clock with me
in that place.
But anyways, as I said, I went down to Miami—or getting back to Reeder Nichols. Right
in that place we had built the radio equipment for this Robertson flight that started off
from England and went down to Australia. And when they were over Australia, the radio
equipment that we had built was so good that Reeder Nichols was enable—was able to
send me a radiogram directly to New York City from Australia, which was halfway
�42
around the world, congratulating me on the operation of the equipment and telling me
where he was and so forth. And I wish I had kept that radiogram because it would have
been a priceless thing. It’s somewheres in our files, but I’ll probably never find them. But
I just mention that about Reeder to show you the kind of guys that we had with us.
Then there was another fellow, a little fellow that we brought with us that became really a
top radio man for Pan American-Grace Airlines. And he’s still with them. His name was
Ross. And I’ll think of his first name in just a minute. But Ross is, I think, still with Pan
American and doing a good job for them. But, of course, now he’s way up in the ranks
instead of down just a little radio communications man—or, we’ll say, radio expert, he’s
now up in the top echelon of either Pan American-Grace or Pan American.
01:02:50
[Navigation race in Florida]
WPL: Now, in the meantime while my little group was moving from Chicago to New York, I
was on my way down to Miami, where I stopped at Orlando, Florida, with the idea of
being with the Sportsman Pilots Association, who had met there the day before the
race—or the couple days before the race that was to take place down in Miami.
Now, these were the National Air Races that Miami put on every year, and they were
really wonderful events. And they were more social than they were aviation, but there
was an awful lot of aviation along with it. And, of course, you went to the races not so
much to see any spectacular burst of speed because the fastest airplanes in those days
were flying 225 miles an hour, about the same speed as a Bonanza does now, but
nevertheless, to—it was a sort of a Roman holiday. You always expected three or four
people to get killed, and this was the gory idea behind the races, really. But nobody
admitted that. We all said, “Oh no, this is the aviation and we’re building aviation and so
forth.”
But the main thing of it is we had an awful lot of fun drinking and joking and eating and a
certain amount of romance went on in the thing. And, of course, I was a kind of a
character in those days because, number one, I was—had a couple of airplanes. And this
Sportsman Pilot’s group were made up of people who had a lot more money than I did,
but believe me, they didn’t know it because I was spending money just like as if I had it,
which I didn’t. And one of the things that they were going to do is they were going to run
a race from Orlando to Miami, which was 113 miles, the next day. And, of course, the
night before I did my share of drinking along with the rest of the fellows, and by morning
when I awakened, I awakened with my perineal hangover that I had, which was always
that I drank well but not wisely. But it wasn’t—I wasn’t a drunkard. I never was a
drunkard. But I certainly could put away my share of all the free drinks that were served.
�43
As a matter of fact, I think I’ve never turned down a free drink. It’s my Scotch instinct
that always gives me the hangovers. [laughs]
So I was not in too good of shape the next morning, but nevertheless, being young, full of
vim, vigor, and vitality and being the fall—I think it was the first of the year now of
1934, I decided that I would go on this race. I didn’t know what the conditions of the race
was, however. And the condition of the race was that it was a navigation race, but they
didn’t tell you that. They said they would hand you an envelope just before you took off,
and with this envelope, you’d be able—you’d get—they’d tell you what the conditions of
the race where.
And the only thing the envelope said is the distance from Orlando to Miami is 113 miles
and your airspeed is computed at 115 miles an hour of your airplane. So that—it said,
“You’ll pass over the following checkpoints,” and gave you five checkpoints en route and
said, “You’ll pass over the finish line,” when they described what the finish line was like
in Miami, “and report to the registration office when you arrive.” And on that—under this
condition, me knowing nothing about the rules of this kind of a race, I was a little bit at a
loss to know what to do. And, of course, they handed—
01:06:06
[End Side B]
[END OF RECORDING]
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Subseries XV-A - William P. Lear, 1910-2002, undated
Description
An account of the resource
William P. Lear, 1910-2002, undated
Identifier
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2000-06-20, Subseries I-A
Audiovisual
Audiovisual items that are not an oral histories, such as personal film footage.
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2000-06-20_AV_034_01
2000-06-20_AV_034_02
2000-06-20_AV_034_transcription
Title
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[Audio recording of William P. Lear discussing his life story (Part 2 of 3)]
Source
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The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers (2000-06-20), Audiovisual Materials
Creator
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Lear, William P. (William Powell), 1902-1978
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Audio recording of William P. Lear discussing his life story, Geneva, Switzerland, circa 1960s. Part 2 of 3.</p>
<p>Handwritten label on reel: "Digital 7/99. Side 1. Lear story, tape two."</p>
<p>Handwritten label on box: "Tape 1 and 2, 7-62. Digital preservation 7-26-99. Bio 10-20s. AIFF-Format. WPL audio."</p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Experiences in Chicago, Illinois as a radio engineer, continued from Part One -- Aviation experiences and memorable flights; personal life in Chicago -- Stories about the automobile radio business; transition to aircraft radio development -- Move to New York; stories about aviators -- Navigation race in Florida
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1960s circa
Subject
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Lear, William P. (William Powell), 1902-1978
Engineers
Radio
Air pilots
Coverage
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Geneva (Switzerland)
Switzerland
Chicago (Ill.)
Illinois
New York (N.Y.)
New York (State)
United States
Extent
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1 sound reel (2 hr., 11 min., 42 sec.) : analog ; 1/4 in
Format
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oral histories (literary works)
open reel audiotapes
Bibliographic Citation
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The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers/The Museum of Flight
Abstract
A summary of the resource.
<p>These audio recordings contain a three-part oral history of William P. Lear, recorded at the Lear home in Geneva, Switzerland, circa 1960s. In Part Two, Lear continues to discuss his engineering career in Chicago, Illinois during the mid-1920s and early 1930s, including his transition from automobile radios to aircraft radio equipment. He also begins to discuss his move to New York in 1934. Other topics discussed include his early aviation experiences; stories about Reeder Nichols, Clyde Pangborn, and other aviators; and a navigation race in Florida in the mid-1930s, which is continued in Part Three. Lear’s son, Bill Lear Jr., is also briefly heard.</p>
<p>During the recording, Lear references a person named Jean (possibly “Jeanne” or “Gene”), who asked for autobiographical information about Lear.</p>
Rights
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In copyright
-
https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/files/original/896323bb3b9e9d98e971f6aba687b157.mp3
789e5e575f8cd409c01600c9d9a6dfe2
https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/files/original/2eda05de09430a503f362dd16a8690a7.pdf
223369197f2d0b9dd0309983834278a7
PDF Text
Text
The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers
The Museum of Flight
Seattle, Washington
[William P. Lear discusses his life story (Part 1 of 3)]
Date: circa 1960
Location: Geneva, Switzerland
�2
Abstract:
These audio recordings contain a three-part oral history of William P. Lear, recorded at the Lear
home in Geneva, Switzerland, circa 1960s. Part One contains a few brief clips of Lear, with
occasional input from his wife Moya, discussing his adolescence and his experiences as a radio
engineer in the mid-1920s. Also included are segments of William, Moya, and their children
conversing together.
During the recording, William and Moya repeatedly reference a person named Jean (possibly
“Jeanne” or “Gene”), who asked for autobiographical information about Lear.
The reel that originally contained this part of the oral history series was later reused by Lear for
another recording. As such, much of the Part One was taped over and has been lost. These clips
are what remains of the original recording.
Restrictions:
Permission to publish material from the William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers must be
obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
Transcript:
Transcribed by Pioneer Transcription Services. Reviewed by TMOF volunteers and staff.
�3
Index:
Conversation between Lear family members ................................................................................. 4
Message to Jean about the Lears’ life in Switzerland; stories from Bill Lear’s adolescence ......... 4
Marriages to Ethel Peterson and Madeline Murphy; experiences in Chicago, Illinois as a radio
engineer ........................................................................................................................................... 9
�4
[William P. Lear discusses his life story (Part 1 of 3)]
[START OF RECORDING]
[Begin Side A]
00:00:00
[Conversation between Lear family members]
MOYA O. LEAR:
Did you?
TINA LEAR: Hm-hmm [affirmative].
[conversation continues in French between members of the Lear family]
MOL: David—neither David—neither John or Shanda ever did as well as David. You should
hear him. And we’re going to make a tape of it so that you can all hear. Bill will bring it
home with him.
CHILD:
And Tina’s going to play at [unintelligible], too.
MOL: Oui. Tina [unintelligible].
WILLIAM P. LEAR: Now we’ll listen to this.
MOL: Okay.
WPL: Then we’ll turn it over. And, Jean, I’ll give you the rest of the stuff on the other side.
[audio break]
00:01:47
[Message to Jean about the Lears’ life in Switzerland; stories from Bill Lear’s adolescence]
WPL: Jean, last night—that was the recording you just heard was done before dinner last night.
We didn’t have much of a dinner because we kind of drank our dinner last night. We had
a couple of wonderful people come in, and then we had a couple more wonderful people
come in. Our new architect and his interior decorator who is prat—just absolutely
inspired. And we’ve been trying to finish off the house. We’ve got a—we’ll never get
this house really finished. We hope we never do anyway. And they came in with the
plans for our playroom, which is a very large playroom right next to the living room. And
we had a few drinks with them, and then we had a countess—what’s her last name,
Mommy?
�5
MOL: De la—
WPL: De la—
MOL: [De la Bar?].
WPL: [De la Bar?], from Paris, who is one of the smartest girls you ever met in your life.
And—
MOL: Her name is Mary Louise [unintelligible], and they call her Malou.
WPL: Malou for Mary Louise. And she’s very, very nice. And as a matter of fact, she’s fixing it
with the Lord Mayor of Paris to have me elected to the Legionnaires. Is that right?
MOL: Yeah. The Legion of Honor, Jean. [laughs]
WPL: [laughs] And this is one of the great things that can happen to you in Europe, is to
become a member of that. And then you get to wear that little red thread between your
lapel, the hole in your lapel and the edge of the lapel. And this is really a very great
distinguishing thing. It’s about—
MOL: That’s Tina’s [unintelligible]—
[audio break]
MOL: [unintelligible]
TL:
[crying]
WPL: Tina.
MOL: Oh.
WPL: Well, oh, I’m terribly sorry. What do you want, sweetheart?
TL:
The milk.
WPL: Oh. Here, Mommy. Telephone to the kitchen. Jean, we have to telephone to our kitchen.
It’s a [sleeper jump?]. And Tina’s complaining because she hasn’t any milk. And we dial
the kitchen. We dial—
MOL: [speaking French].
WPL: See, Tina, when Daddy is on the microphone, don’t make any noise of any kind, like
kicking or touching the dish with your spoon. Be extremely quiet, won’t you?
TL:
Uh huh [affirmative].
�6
MOL: Or you might get a good kick in the teeth.
WPL: That’s right. Daddy’s [unintelligible]. And you know I love you. Now, we had to dial 14,
and you heard Mommy talk to the kitchen. All right, we’re off to the races now, Mommy.
It’s—Jean’s getting pretty damn tired of all this stuff about our personal life right now.
She wants to know—as a matter of fact, she says here, she wants to know childhood,
where spent, size of family, economic status, talents, aptitudes, ambition, education,
formal or otherwise. Mostly otherwise.
MOL: Where are you now?
WPL: Well, I’m still—
MOL: Childhood. Where [unintelligible/laughing].
WPL: She skips all the rest of it because she knows I never got out of childhood, really, see. At
least—as a matter of fact, I never do feel any older than a child until I—
MOL: Okay.
WPL: —look at girls. And here comes our wonderful Franco.
MOL: Merci, Franco.
WPL: And he’s brought the cream for Tina now. And Tina’s going to have thé. Tea to you,
Jean. And she’s sitting alongside of our bed at our dressing table having breakfast. We
just had breakfast in bed.
[background conversation between Moya and Franco]
WPL: And we had a wonderful breakfast. We had—is it derf? Or lerf?
MOL: Huh?
WPL: What’d we have?
MOL: Oeuf au plat.
WPL: Oeuf au plat. Means “egg.”
MOL That’s a fried egg. And translated, you know, it’s an egg flat. It’s a flat egg. And that’s
what it is.
WPL: That’s right. And we have “toast” [said with an accent]. And café.
MOL: And if you say “toast,” they say, “[Como?]?” [laughs]
�7
WPL: You have to say “toast” [said with an accent]. So French is devilish because you could
say it exactly the way they say it, and they can’t understand it. And then they say it the
way you said it, and they say, “Toast? Oh, toast.” [laughs]
MOL: And the confiture.
WPL: We didn’t have any confiture this morning. That’s—
MOL: No.
WPL: —some kind of jam or jelly or so forth. But we did have—we always have a morceau
d’orange. We used to drink jus d’orange, which was the juice of the orange. But now we
have morceau d’orange, which is the little pieces of orange. Isn’t that right, Mommy?
MOL: Morceau d’orange.
WPL: Morceau d’orange. And Tina’s the only one that can say “d’orange” right. Anyway—
MOL: Wait.
[conversation in French between Moya and Tina Lear]
WPL: Well, she’s heard her talk French already.
[conversation continues]
WPL: Anyway, now we’re back. And as I think before—the last thing you heard about my
terrible, just uninteresting life, which you brought this upon yourself, Jean. I can’t help
you any because you asked for it and by God, you’re going to get it. And I’ve now—it’s
17. I’ve gone to—or you see, I’m 16 or 15. Wait a minute now. I graduated from high
school—or Kershaw School when I was 15 years old, 8th grade, which was on 64th and
Union. And then I went to work for the summer, and then in the fall, I went to high
school, Inglewood High School, where, by the way, this little [Irene Roberts?] was now a
sophomore when I arrived there. And by this time, she wouldn’t even spit on me because
I’m only a freshman.
But anyway, the—let’s see now. I went about six weeks to high school and discovered
that that I knew some of the things that teachers didn’t know. So I [audio
distortion/unintelligible] church people. I went to Sunday School, and then I went to
church. And as a matter of fact, when I was—
[audio break]
MOL: —Jean, because this is for kids, Daddy. These books, you know? [laughs]
�8
WPL: Well, I know. But I’m not—Jean, this is something I’m just putting on the record. From
what you can get, say, the part you want out of it, but—
MOL: Oh, sure.
WPL: —in order for me to give you the whole story—well, the other thing was that there was
a—when I was in machine shop in that same period, there was a big machine moved into
the machine shop. And the instructor down there was a real cocky sort of a guy, and he
had this drawing of how to install this machine. And it—the drawing showed a plumb
line from the countershaft that was above the machine, and it was drawn right through the
center of a moveable part of the machine that you normally—in drawing this machine—
in working this machine, you could move this part back and forward. But it accidently
was drawn right through the center of this thing, but down at a fixed part of the machine,
further down, it said it should be two inches from a fixed part of the machine, where this
plumb line could be. But he kept line—he kept—when he lined up the machine, which
weighed a couple thousand pounds, he would take a crow bar and he inched it into
position so it was lined up with this movable part of the machine, which I saw was
wrong.
And I went up to him, and I said, “Mr. So-and-So, you’re making a mistake.” And I—and
he said, “You go back to your bench,” see. “I know what I’m doing.” So he lined up the
machine laboriously, and after he was—when he turned his back, I went over and spun
this wheel that moved this thing now, which moved it a couple inches, you see. So when
he came back, he saw that it wasn’t lined up before. Well, he thought somehow or
another, the whole class had come over there and moved this 2,000-pound machine. So
laboriously, he gets a crow bar out and he inches the machine back now so that the crow
bar—so that this plumb line is lined up with this moveable part of the machine. And he
walks out of the room.
And by this time, the class is aware of what I’m doing. I spin the wheel the other
direction, see. And he comes back in. And now he sees that the machine has been moved
again. But it never donned on him that I was spinning the wheel on this movable part of
the machine and that he was doing something stupid. But he finally caught—the fact that,
because everybody was snickering and laughing at him, that some—that I was the
ringleader in moving this machine back and forth, see. So he started to give me hell for
doing this thing. And I walked over to him, and I said, “I tried to tell you that you’re
lining it up with the wrong part of the machine. You should line it up with a fixed part of
the machine and not a movable part of the machine. It was just accidently that that was
drawn through this center of this movable line.” And then I’d move this—I’d just spun
the wheel and he’d moved this thing back and forth.
�9
Well, it made him such a fool that he just told me, he says, “You are not welcome in this
class any longer,” see. And I had to leave that class. But I had known enough about
machine shop at that time that I didn’t—I knew I couldn’t learn anything from him. So I
got out of there. And that was the end of my high school education. And this—I guess
they—those two instructors thought I was really Peck’s bad boy anyway.
00:11:43
[Marriages to Ethel Peterson and Madeline Murphy; experiences in Chicago, Illinois as a
radio engineer]
WPL: But then I decided to go back—no. Then I was in—I decided that my—I found a little
girl that I liked very much. And she was in the drug store there and—out on one of the
main streets. And—
MOL: [unintelligible] Ethel.
WPL: No. This is not Ethel. I’m married to Ethel. But I run into this little Madeline. And
Madeline is a real beautiful little girl at that time, and I just fell head over heels in love
with her. And I was never in love with Ethel. But I had to—and I now started to play this
little girl and finally things got real serious, and I decided to run away with her. And I
was just as, you know, all footloose and fancy free mentally as I could be, because I
never really felt like I was married to Ethel. And even though we’d had two children
and—but there was just nothing that we had any common at all. It was—she was a little
dese-dem-and-dose girls and a nice little girl. Very nice. But I just couldn’t find any—I
didn’t love her, and I didn’t think that she would be a kind of a gal I should go along with
forever.
So I ran away. And there’s a long story connected with that. Someday I’ll tell the story,
but I don’t want to tell it now. But Moya knows the story, and it’s—some of it is not very
pleasant. But nevertheless, I finally—Ethel finally got a divorce from me, and then I
married Madeline. And we drove into drove into Chicago with my old Model T Ford
from all the way down—we were married in Boonville, Missouri. And I drove all the
way from Boonville—or rather, from Tulsa to—or from Kansas City to Boonville to
Chicago. And I arrived in Chicago with a brand-new wife and a real old car and a flat
tire. And I guess I was pretty much of a flat tire because I had exactly one five-cent piece
when I arrived in Chicago.
By this time, Mother and Otto had moved back from the farm now, and they were living
back in their house again on 65th Place. And I was—it was 1924. And there was a radio
show—
�10
MOL: Do you ever go by 65th Place to see that house?
WPL: No. I just look at it sometimes when I’m flying over it. But it—we went back, and I
wasn’t going to go back to Mother and Otto. So I went to the Dornel, D-O-R-N-E-L,
Hotel, which was an apartment hotel, where I discovered that I could rent a nice little
two-room kitchenette apartment and that I could send my groceries in and that they
would pay for the groceries at the desk and put them on my bill. And tenants were so
hard to get in those days that there was no problem. I didn’t have to pay anything down.
So we moved in. I didn’t know where I was going to get the money to pay for the rent,
and I didn’t know where I was going to get the money to pay for our groceries. But as I
say, I had one nickel. And by getting the groceries in, why, we got something to eat. And
we—my car I couldn’t use because it had a flat tire and I couldn’t get the tire fixed. And
so I walked into—I started to walk downtown, and I got a ride. I hitched a ride. And in
those days, it wasn’t too hard to hitch a ride because there weren’t as many terrible things
happening to people that picked up hitchhikers as happen now.
And so I got down to the Coliseum, where the radio show was in progress at the time.
Now, the radio show in those days was a really cacophonous affair because they—every
one tried to outdo the other in playing their radios as loud as they could. So as a result,
you couldn’t hear anybody’s radio. But it was just a whole lot of squawks and noises and
anything but music. And everybody was showing off how loud their radio sets were.
And, of course, at the radio show, they—at those—in those days, they had batteries to run
the radio—the wireless receiving sets or radios. And they had B-battery eliminators and
A-battery eliminators. And they were just beginning to come on the market so that you
could operate—there wasn’t an A-battery eliminator, but there was a B-battery
eliminator. And Raytheon had a B-battery eliminator. And the QRS Music Company was
trying to make a sort of a rectifier tube like the Raytheon tube, and they hadn’t found any
application for the thing at the time.
But the Universal Battery Company was there, and they were trying to get going in the
radio business somehow. They were selling batteries, of course. And I ran into a friend of
mine that I knew in Quincy, Illinois whose name was Howard Sams. And Howard Sams
was a great friend of Irving Johnson and myself. And Irving, by the way—that’s another
little part of my life where I lived with Irving and his mother. He was a good Swede boy,
and she was a wonderful old Swedish woman. And her—his father’s name was Gustov.
And they lived in the cemetery, and he took care of the cemetery. And he used to make
some wonderful elderberry wine. I remember that. It was—to me, it was the greatest ever.
And so he had—this fellow Howard Sams was a friend of—this was—by the way, Irving
Johnson lived in Quincy, Illinois. And he was associated with me in the—as my assistant
�11
in the Quincy Radio Laboratories that we had there. So anyway, Howard Sams had called
on us to sell us storage batteries when we were running Quincy Radio Laboratories, and
so I know him. Well, then when I was standing outside of this radio—the Coliseum
trying to get in, why, here he came out. And I said, “Hi, Howard.” And he said, “Hi, Bill.
What are you doing?” And I says, “Well, I’d like to get in the show, but I haven’t any
way to get in.” He said, “Here’s a pass. Go on in.”
So I went in, and I wandered around through this great big Coliseum looking at all the
different equipment and things, most of which I didn’t understand. I mean, I knew some
fundamentals about it. But there was a lot of things in there that really excited me. And
finally I realized I had to get a job. So I thought, well, the best way to get a job is to put
up a big front. So I went up to Howard Sams’ boss, a fellow by the name of R. D. Morey.
There was R. D. and R. S. Morey, two brothers that owned—that rather—owned—or
were the managers of the Universal Battery Company. So I sold them on the idea of
hiring me to develop a B-battery eliminator for them, a B-battery eliminator to eliminate
all eliminators. And they hired me as—
MOL: What is a B-battery eliminator?
WPL: Well, you had to have an A-battery and a B-battery. A-battery was a storage battery, and
a B-battery, you used to use dry cells. And they were very expensive, and they would
wear out, you see, because you’d take so much current out of them. And you had to have
90 volts. That meant that you had to have—to get 90 volts, you had to have 60 dry cells,
see. Sixty of those little dry cells like we’ve got around here. And they didn’t last long,
and so they—it was just—there was no reason to have dry cells if you could eliminate
them. So what you did is you take the line current from the house current and convert it
to DC. And then you would smooth it with a—condensers and chokes and so forth, you
ended up with a B-battery eliminator.
And I made the Universal B-battery eliminator. We sold quite a lot of them. At that time,
I didn’t even know Ohm’s law. But I ran into a fellow by the name of Smith, Waldorf A.
Smith, who worked for the Carter Radio Company. And Smith taught me Ohm’s law,
showed me how to apply Ohm’s law. And, of course, as soon as I knew Ohm’s law, I was
a real big—
MOL: You were an engineer.
WPL: I was really an engineer then, see. And I proved that the next year, as a matter of fact,
1925, at the radio show which was held at the Stevens Hotel. And it was the first event
that took place in the Stevens Hotel when the Stevens Hotel was first built.
�12
MOL: And, Jean, when I moved to Piqua as a bride, never had cooked anything ever in my
whole life. [Yoba?] Smith, Smitty’s wife, was the one who taught me how to fix my first
Thanksgiving turkey.
[knocking on door]
WPL: Come in.
MOL: Entrer.
[dog barks in background]
[conversation in French between Moya and unidentified person]
[banging noise in background]
WPL: Oh. That noise you hear is we’re putting in a telephone, Jean. And I guess they’re putting
it in—I don’t know where they’re putting it in, but they’re sure as hell putting in a
telephone. Jean, let’s see, I was—and now propositioning—
MOL: We’re talking about B-battery eliminators.
WPL: I was propositioning now R. D. Morey for a job.
MOL: Yeah.
WPL: He hired me, and he gave me 100 dollars a week.
MOL: Boy.
WPL: And 100 dollars a week was more money than the chief engineer was making. So he had
to give me 75 dollars a week in the payroll and then hand me 25 dollars alongside of it.
No, I got 125 dollars a week. That was it. And, of course, this was tremendous money in
those days. And all of a sudden, I’m wealthy. I’m able to pay for my hotel. I’m able to
pay for my—get a tire for my car. And now I begin working not only during the day—not
only am I working during the day for the Universal Battery Company—
[banging noise continues in background]
WPL: How long do you think that’s going to go on?
MOL: I don’t know. But finish this sequence so—
WPL: All right. But I’m working at night in my little two-room apartment, and I’m building a
radio set around this QRS tube that’s been brought out, which is a 300-milliamp rectifier
tube. And when I get it finished, I invite Mr. Tom Fletcher, who is the head of the QRS
�13
Company—and he’s a real wheeler and dealer in those days, and he owned the QRS
Music Roll Company and the QRS tube factory. And he was a friend of Bill Grunow,
who owned the Grigsby-Grunow Company.
Well, as soon as he came out and saw this thing—it was very funny. When I had quite a
few of the leading lights and radio, the top management come out and look at this thing,
and operating out of my house, and they were so impressed with it that they would take
me out in the hall and each one would offer me something better than the last one. But
Tom Fletcher made me the best deal. He offered me 200 dollars a week if I’d come to
work for him. So I went back and I told R. D. Morey, I said, “R. D., you know, I’ve got a
wife and—a brand-new wife, and I’ve got an old wife and child that I’m supporting. And,
you know, I’d just like to live a little better than I am living. And I just wonder if you’d
give me more money.” He said, “Well, Lear,” he said, “Your problem is you have a
champagne appetite with a beer income.” And I said, “Well, you’ve certainly hit the nail
right on the head. But I feel that I can do something about the income, and I don’t think I
can do much about the appetite.” So he said, “Well, more power to you.” He says—he
said, “I just wish you all the luck in the world.” And I’d finished my project for them
anyway.
So I quit there, and I went to work for QRS now for 200 dollars a week. And so I had
only been at QRS for about two months when, lo and behold, a big problem came up over
at the Majestic—or rather, the Grigsby-Grunow-Hinds Company. They had gone to work,
and they’d made a complete A-battery eliminator. No, they’d made a B-battery
eliminator, and they were going to put it in—they were putting it in production. And they
had thousands and thousands and thousands of these things made because they were
making about a thousand a day. But they had neglected to ever try them on a radio set.
And lo and behold, when you tried them—they did everything that should be done as far
as generating DC was concerned, but they had never tried them on radio sets, so they
didn’t know that they made more noise than the radio set could receive through, so that
whenever they hooked them up to a radio set, it would just buzz and make all the noise in
the world, but you couldn’t get any radio.
So they were desperate because they had literally millions of dollars’ worth of these
things around, but they couldn’t—they were getting them back faster than they were
sending them out. So Tom said, “Well, I’ll send over a bright young guy I’ve got working
for me here. Maybe he can find the trouble.” And I went over and found the trouble and
fixed it for them, which wasn’t very much of a job to fix. And when I did this, well, you
can imagine that Bill Grunow said, “Hey, Tom,” he said, “I want that guy working for
me.” So he gave me—I think it was 12,000 dollars a year, 1,000 dollars a month, to go to
work for him. And I didn’t have any particular job to do except just sit around and think
�14
up things to work on. And this is a whole new story that I’ll start on the other tape. You
got anything, Mommy, you want to say for about three seconds?
MOL: Oh, no, darling.
WPL: Huh?
[banging noise in background]
MOL: This has been so much fun to listen to this. And we have to have a copy. Because we
have to go on our vacation when you come back from the States and go away up in the
mountains some place with a tape recorder and work on our own book. Because, Jean,
you started us out now. I mean, we’ve been writing a book for lo these many years, and
we’ve needed the impetus. And I think this is it.
WPL: Well, especially if we can get some of this stuff typed up by somebody, then we could
kind of rearrange it and put it—
MOL: Yes.
WPL: —and put it in the right order.
MOL: That’s right. We can get it chronologically arranged. And then you would probably
remember other things. Because I’d like to—I mean, I know Daddy could never go back
to 1910 and trace methodically the periods of what happened to him. Generally, he could.
But, oh, you remember things, people’s names. It’s just fantastic.
00:27:06
[END OF RECORDING]
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Subseries XV-A - William P. Lear, 1910-2002, undated
Description
An account of the resource
William P. Lear, 1910-2002, undated
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
2000-06-20, Subseries I-A
Audiovisual
Audiovisual items that are not an oral histories, such as personal film footage.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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2000-06-20_AV_033_01
2000-06-20_AV_033_01_transcription
Title
A name given to the resource
[Audio recording of William P. Lear discussing his life story (Part 1 of 3)]
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers (2000-06-20), Audiovisual Materials
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Lear, William P. (William Powell), 1902-1978
Lear, Moya Olsen, 1915-2001
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Audio recording of William P. Lear discussing his life story, Geneva, Switzerland, circa 1960s. Part 1 of 3.</p>
<p>Text on reel label: "1-9 - Belgium Air Review. Geneva interview. [illegible]. Carl [illegible]. Belgium Air Review."</p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Conversation between Lear family members -- Message to Jean about the Lears’ life in Switzerland; stories from Bill Lear’s adolescence -- Marriages to Ethel Peterson and Madeline Murphy; experiences in Chicago, Illinois as a radio engineer
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1960s circa
Subject
The topic of the resource
Lear, William P. (William Powell), 1902-1978
Lear, Moya Olsen, 1915-2001
Engineers
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Geneva (Switzerland)
Switzerland
Chicago (Ill.)
Illinois
United States
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
1 sound reel (27 min., 6 sec.) : analog ; 1/4 in
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
oral histories (literary works)
open reel audiotapes
Bibliographic Citation
A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible.
The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers/The Museum of Flight
Abstract
A summary of the resource.
<p>These audio recordings contain a three-part oral history of William P. Lear, recorded at the Lear home in Geneva, Switzerland, circa 1960s. Part One contains a few brief clips of Lear, with occasional input from his wife Moya, discussing his adolescence and his experiences as a radio engineer in the mid-1920s. Also included are segments of William, Moya, and their children conversing together.</p>
<p>During the recording, William and Moya repeatedly reference a person named Jean (possibly “Jeanne” or “Gene”), who asked for autobiographical information about Lear.</p>
<p>The reel that originally contained this part of the oral history series was later reused by Lear for another recording. As such, much of the Part One was taped over and has been lost. These clips are what remains of the original recording.</p>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
-
https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/files/original/9660b301015560857385a3ac2219c05b.JPG
9fb52a1d44ce959c165b433314b8aa4f
https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/files/original/b4a88bceb2682b733b627c934e9b322f.JPG
0e9c9d025d016cd01268b1965aaf9b3a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Subseries XV-A - William P. Lear, 1910-2002, undated
Description
An account of the resource
William P. Lear, 1910-2002, undated
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
2000-06-20, Subseries I-A
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
2000-06-20_image_552_01
2000-06-20_image_552_02
Title
A name given to the resource
[William P. Lear in his U.S. Navy uniform]
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers (2000-06-20), Box 170, Folder 9
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Photographic portrait of William P. Lear in his U.S. Navy uniform, Naval Station Great Lakes, Chicago, Illinois, circa 1920. </p><p>Inscription on verso: "William Powell Lear -- Great Lakes Naval Base -- Chicago, Ill. 1920 / Personal album."</p>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1920 circa
Subject
The topic of the resource
Lear, William P. (William Powell), 1902-1978
Great Lakes Naval Training Center (Great Lakes, Ill.)
Soldiers
United States. Navy
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Chicago (Ill.)
Illinois
United States
Extent
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1 photograph : black and white ; 8 x 10 in
Language
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English
Format
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photographic prints
Bibliographic Citation
A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible.
The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers/The Museum of Flight
Rights
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No copyright - United States