1
10
1
-
https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/files/original/6333b4fa3da6313acab55510e7610262.mp4
0ccebf2be3927b69a839c4d9cef39461
https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/files/original/27f6d73d4f3e88be7abed545d535ba3a.pdf
645c7cf082feab77bbe5030b095dd74e
PDF Text
Text
The Museum of Flight Oral History Collection
The Museum of Flight
Seattle, Washington
Michael R. Hallman
Interviewed by: Steve Little
Date: October 25, 2021
Location: Redmond, Washington
This interview was made possible with generous support from
Mary Kay and Michael Hallman
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�2
Abstract:
Museum of Flight trustee Michael R. “Mike” Hallman is interviewed about his life and
experiences in the computer, aviation, and nonprofit fields. He discusses his career with
International Business Machines (IBM) during the 1960s through the late 1980s and his
subsequent careers with Boeing Computer Services and Microsoft. He also discusses his
involvement with The Museum of Flight as a trustee, interim CEO, and (along with his wife,
Mary Kay) co-founder of the Museum’s Oral History Program.
Biography:
Mike Hallman worked in Sales and Marketing with IBM, as the Boeing Company’s Chief
Information Officer and then Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, and is a longtime trustee of
the Museum of Flight.
Michael Robert Hallman was born in San Bernardino, California on June 6, 1945, to Frank and
Virginia Hallman. He was the oldest of three children. His father flew B-25s in the Pacific
theater during World War II, returning home in 1944 and then serving as a bombing and
navigation instructor at George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. Hallman grew up
around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and spent his high school years in suburban Chicago, Illinois.
He then earned his bachelor’s in business administration in 1966 and MBA in 1967, both from
the University of Michigan. While in school he worked summers for the Greyhound Bus
Company escorting tours to New York City. He also made a few trips to Colorado Springs,
Colorado, where he met Mary Kay Johnson, whom he married in 1967.
After graduation Hallman joined International Business Machines (IBM) in the sales and
marketing area. He started out in Chicago in 1968. Over his 20-year career at IBM he held
several different positions, remaining primarily sales and marketing. He moved among several
IBM locations in addition to Chicago including Detroit, Michigan; White Plains, New York; St.
Louis, Missouri; and Atlanta, Georgia. By the end of his tenure with IBM he was Vice President
of Field Operations with responsibility for half of the country’s sales and service support.
Recruited by Boeing Computer Services (BCS) in 1987, Hallman ran their computer operations
for services provided to non-Boeing companies. These included the Naval Air Weapons Station
China Lake, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, NASA Ground Communications,
and the New York Police Department. Hallman was promoted to President of BCS just as
Boeing was embarking on the 777 program, which was their first airplane designed entirely with
computers. In his time at BCS, Hallman managed the transition from slide rules and drafting
tables to the CATIA computer system.
In 1990 Microsoft recruited Hallman to become their President. Joining the company when they
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�3
were early in the development of personal computers, he managed the company to $1 billion in
sales while streamlining operations.
At about this same time Hallman joined the Museum of Flight’s Board of Trustees. In the more
than three decades he has served with the Board, he has served as the Museum’s Chairman, Vice
Chairman, and as the interim President and CEO during a time of transition. He has chaired the
Exhibits Committee, the Communications and Marketing Committee, the Compensation
Committee, several gala committees, and has served on virtually every standing committee of the
board.
While serving as a Trustee, Hallman’s primary focus has centered on enhancing the Museum’s
educational mission. With a vision to record and preserve important stories of people who
worked, lived, and shaped aviation, he and his wife created the Mary Kay and Michael Hallman
Oral History Program. He also helped establish the Michael and Mary Kay Hallman Spaceflight
Academy exhibit. In 2020 Hallman was the fourth recipient of the Red Barn Heritage Award in
recognition of his significant and exceptional commitment to The Museum of Flight. His
relationship with the late William E. Boeing, Jr. and their mutual admiration for one another lead
to his appointment as the only trustee representative of the Aldarra Foundation, the Boeing
family’s foundation.
As of 2022, Hallman continues to live in the Seattle area and maintains his involvement with the
Museum of Flight.
Biographical information derived from interview and additional information provided by
interviewee.
Interviewer:
Steve Little worked in the finance and statistical analysis field for 38 years and retired from
General Electric Capital. He holds a degree in economics from the University of Colorado at
Boulder and is a licensed pilot. As of 2019, he is a member of The Museum of Flight Docent
Corps and is the Vice Chair of the Docent Leadership Committee. He also volunteers for the
Museum Archives.
Restrictions:
Permission to publish material from The Museum of Flight Oral History Program must be
obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�4
Videography:
Videography by Peder Nelson, TMOF Exhibits Developer.
Transcript:
Transcribed by Pioneer Transcription Services. Reviewed by TMOF volunteers and staff.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�5
Index:
Introduction and personal background............................................................................................ 6
Father’s military service during World War II ............................................................................... 7
Family and educational background ............................................................................................... 9
Career with IBM ........................................................................................................................... 12
Career with Boeing and Microsoft ................................................................................................ 15
Interest in aviation and education and involvement with The Museum of Flight ........................ 19
Experiences as Museum’s interim CEO ....................................................................................... 24
Story about Captain Joe Kimm and interest in oral histories........................................................ 28
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park ................................................................................................ 30
Relationship with Bill Boeing Jr. .................................................................................................. 32
Philanthropy and legacy................................................................................................................ 33
Dealing with crises and tragedies ................................................................................................. 36
Thoughts on the Museum’s future ................................................................................................ 37
Aviation experiences ..................................................................................................................... 39
Concluding remarks ...................................................................................................................... 41
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�6
Michael R. Hallman
[START OF INTERVIEW]
00:00:00
[Introduction and personal background]
STEVE LITTLE:
Hello. My name is Steve Little, and today is Monday, October 25th, 2021.
We’re at the home of Mike and Mary Kay Hallman interviewing Mike for The Museum
of Flight’s Oral History Program. Mike Hallman had a long career in the computer
industry, beginning with IBM in the mid-1960s. Recruited to Boeing as a CIO, he was
instrumental in the computer-aided design of the 777. About the time Mike left Boeing
for Microsoft, he was asked to become a trustee at The Museum of Flight. With his top
flight management skills and passion for education of aviation, he became a driving
source behind the Museum’s success.
Over the ensuing years, he served on most, if not all, of the board’s committees,
including chairing the Exhibits Committee for a number of years. His leadership and
vision recognized the need to record and preserve the important stories of the various
people who worked, lived and shaped aviation. From that came the Mike and Mary Kay
Hallman Oral History Program. It’s an honor to include your history in the program that
you so generously provide.
As a background, I’d like to just get some general questions. First, please state your full
name and how you prefer it pronounced and then spell it.
MICHAEL HALLMAN:
N.
It’s Michael Robert Hallman. Mike. Last name is H-A-L-L-M-A-
SL:
And when and where were you born?
MH:
I was born in San Bernardino, California [audio briefly drops] on June 6th, 1945, which
interestingly enough is the first-year anniversary of D-Day, the third anniversary of the
Battle of Midway, and also was two months exactly before the first atomic bomb was
dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, and lastly was my mother’s 19th birthday.
SL:
That’s pretty cool. Same birthday. I like that. A little bit about your parents. [audio
briefly drops] What were your parent’s names and professions?
MH:
Yes. Both my parents lived for a long time in Wilmington, Delaware. Frank Hallman was
my dad’s name. Virginia Hallman—Virginia Johnson originally, but Virginia Hallman
was her name. Backgrounds are kind of interesting. My mother’s background for one side
of her grandparents were German immigrants here in the early 1900s. They came over as
indentured servants and didn’t speak English. My grandmother spoke English at home—
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�7
or spoke only German at home, didn’t figure out what was going on until she went to
school and couldn’t understand what the teacher was saying.
My father has an interesting background because we can trace his genealogy back to one
of the first settlers on the Swedish expedition to create a colony in the New World, Johan
Andersson Stalcop. And so we go back all the way to 1643 on that side.
00:03:08
[Father’s military service during World War II]
SL:
Very interesting. Exactly. I know you did talk a little bit about your dad being with IBM,
and he has a lot of service in the war, World War II?
MH:
Yes.
SL:
If you care to talk a little about that?
MH:
Sure. He had gone to two years at the University of Delaware and then left and was
working New York City in 1940, got a job with IBM as a draftsman. He actually was in
the National Guard then and was part of the 7th Regiment Armory, actually lived there
prior to the war. The Armory’s quite a famous building in New York, still stands.
And so in January of 1942, right after Pearl Harbor, he volunteered, wanted to fly, and
basically got transferred from the National Guard to the Army Air Corps and went into
pilot training. But the interesting thing here is is that when they figured out that he had a
fairly strong math background and was a draftsman, he immediately got tapped for
navigation for the Pacific Theater—where, unlike Europe, they weren’t flying by
landmarks, which was all dead reckoning—and so got sent to the Pan Am Navigation
School in Coral Gables, Florida and became a navigator-bombardier before he went
overseas to the South Pacific.
So at age 20, he was assigned to a B-52 [sic – meant B-25] bomb group and ended up
being the squadron navigator to get them from Hamilton Field in California to Hickam
Field to Christmas Island to Canton Island and ultimately ended up in Fiji. So I guess the
training worked because they got there.
SL:
They got there.
MH:
So he spent a little over a year and a half in theater flying B-25s. And the history there
was the Japanese were trying to move down the Solomon Islands to cut off
communications with Australia. We were trying to push them back. Guadalcanal was
finally taken in February of ‘43. My dad got there in June of ‘43. And so this was
basically trying to disable or just—to totally take apart the Japanese advance and keep
them from either invading Australia or going further down the Solomon chain. So they
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�8
spent the next year and a half—or he spent the next year and a half in theater, and it
basically was bombing islands, including some islands that were actually were behind—
islands that we were occupying at the time. But the primary objective was to try to totally
take apart Rabaul, which was the major Japanese base there. There were about four or
five airfields there.
And what was interesting about it was they had B-50—excuse me, B-17s in the bomb
group, which are okay against fixed targets—hangars and airplanes—didn’t do well
against ships, which was the primary issue they were dealing with when the Japanese
were trying to resupply these islands. So they turned the B-25s into strafers and low-level
bombers. And there’s some pretty exciting stories about what they did. The B-25 got
totally modified from a straight bomber to a strafer. Some of them had as many as
fourteen forward-firing .50 calibers, and they even put a 75-millimeter cannon in them to
deal with the shipping in the area.
Anyways, he spent a year and a half in theater, came back in the middle of ‘44, got
married, ended up—still in the service—became a bombing and navigation instructor at
the old George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. They lived in California. That’s
why I was born in California, not in Delaware.
SL:
Okay. And there’s one photo you showed before we started this of your dad in a life raft?
MH:
Yes. Well, he had 55 missions—or 55 and a half, depending on how you counted it. They
got hit by antiaircraft fire on the way back from a bombing run in New Britain on Rabaul
and ended up ditching. Nobody was severely injured or died. But they floated around in a
life raft, I understand, for about five hours before they got picked up by a PBY. So we do
have a picture from the PBY of them taking this vacation cruise on a life raft in the
Solomon Sea.
SL:
[laughs] Oh, geez. That’s an interesting history of the war. I didn’t realize that there were
less missions required in the Pacific than they typically did in Europe.
MH:
Yeah.
SL:
[unintelligible]
MH:
I don’t know how that worked. That particular theater was really at the total ends of the
supply line. I mean, we didn’t know how—you know, Guadalcanal fell in February ‘43.
My dad went there in June of ‘43. They were operating out of Henderson Field. But most
of those islands that they were either flying out of had no shipping facilities for supply
ships to come in. They were having to offload stuff onto landing craft and so on and so
forth.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�9
So my dad had the nickname of “Spam.” And I asked him about that. He said, “Well, the
food stuff that seemed to be in kind of abundant supply was peanut butter and spam.”
And he was one of the few people that actually liked that. But these guys had a tough
time. They called the Thirteenth Air Force the Jungle Air Force because that’s what they
were operating in, is these small islands and jungle.
SL:
So he ended up, after the war, was in for a short period of time, a couple of years, and
then out into IBM.
MH:
Went back to IBM. When he got back, he actually went and all the servicemen coming
back met with the CEO, Tom Watson of IBM, and he welcomed them back and asked
them what they wanted to do. And Dad said, “Well, I’d like to go back to Wilmington,
not New York, and I’d like to be a salesman.” And Tom turned around, picked up his
phone, called the office in Wilmington, and said, “You got a new salesman coming
down,” turned around to my father and said, “Okay, go buy a hat and turn up.”
00:09:59
[Family and educational background]
SL:
That simple.
MH:
Yeah.
SL:
I think that’s pretty cool.
MH:
Yeah.
SL:
Yeah. [clears throat] Excuse me. Brothers and sisters? You had other brothers and
sisters?
MH:
I have one sister who was born in Augusta, Georgia when my dad was actually down at
the Savannah River H-bomb plant with IBM. And I have a brother that was born in
Wilmington. My brother is three years younger than I am, and my sister is five years
younger than he was.
SL:
Okay. And I don’t know whether this is a good spot to bring this in or not, but I know—
as you were CEO of the Museum, you also had children.
MH:
Oh, yes.
SL:
And your children and your grandchildren and that kind of thing? That’s something we
sometimes miss in oral histories, is this succession line. So if you’d like to talk about that
a little bit? Yeah.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�10
MH:
Oh, sure. We have two daughters. One daughter lives down in Seattle, unmarried. My
oldest daughter, Jennifer, lives here in Woodinville, and she has two granddaughters. So I
live in an all-female-controlled family with daughters and granddaughters.
SL:
That’s very interesting, though. Yeah. We’ll talk more about that as we get into the
Museum. I’d kind of like to expand on that a little bit. How did you and Mary Kay meet?
MH:
Well, I went to the University of Michigan and went—graduated from high school in ‘63.
The Vietnam War was heating up then. We were basically told, “You’ve got four years to
go to college and then welcome to the Army.”
So I went to the University of Michigan. And the first summer after my freshman year, I
got a job with the Greyhound Bus Company to escort bus tours to New York City,
primarily for the World’s Fair at the time. And so I would make weekly trips to New
York during the summer. But I also took a couple trips to Colorado Springs. Mary Kay’s
father, actually, after the war, had stayed in the service. She was a—going to college
there and was a waitress at the Antlers Hotel—old Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs. I
would put my tourists on the bus to go see Pikes Peak or whatever and then go into the
coffee shop and talk to Mary Kay. And we just—that was our kind of mode of
communication. We never lived in the same city. We traveled back and forth for holidays
and whatnot.
But it got—apparently her mother thought I was maybe a good catch and invited me out
to the house. I think it was the end of the first summer. Interesting story about that. Her
father was a major at that time in the Air Force, and I was taught to be polite when you
visit people, so I asked her mom and dad, “Is there anything I can do to help” when we
went out to dinner at their house. And Mary Kay’s father said, “Sure, mow the lawn.”
And that was my kind of introduction to Major Butler.
SL:
[laughs] Did you mow the lawn?
MH:
Yes. Yes.
SL:
That’s funny. So to get back to the education a bit, I—where did you go to high school?
MH:
Well, we lived in Philadelphia up until I was a junior in high school, and then my dad got
transferred to Chicago. And so I graduated from suburban Chicago. Glen Ellyn, to be
specific. Glenbard West High School. I didn’t have any particular allegiance to any
college. I had a math teacher I respected quite well. She said, “Why don’t you go to the
University of Michigan? They’ve got a great engineering program,” which is what I
thought I was interested in at the time. You have to remember, I was graduating during
the post-Sputnik windup of NASA, so science—what we now call STEM was front and
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�11
center on everybody’s mind, so I thought I wanted to be an engineer. And so that’s how I
ended up in Ann Arbor.
And because of the pressure of the draft, I basically doubled up on everything that I was
doing because I thought I had four years and got my—end up transferring to the business
school, got a bachelor’s in business administration in three years, and then got my MBA
in the fourth year. So I actually graduated in four years with an MBA.
SL:
That’s a huge amount of work.
MH:
Well, if you plan it right it, it wasn’t too bad, because you just take all your electives in
the graduate school and do it. And I really liked school. I was always a good student, a
voracious reader, particularly a reader of histories and whatnot, probably because we
lived in historical parts of the country. Philadelphia, with the—its history. With the Boy
Scouts, we used to go camping at Valley Forge and whatnot. So all that stuff was very
front and center to do what I was doing.
SL:
Well, that would be fascinating, I think. Yeah. You talked about—this was like 1966, ‘67
era—
MH:
Graduated in ‘67.
SL:
Okay. So Vietnam’s heating up about that time. Protests are heating up, I should say.
Vietnam had already begun to heat up. In ‘67, we had the Apollo 1 tragedy and yet the
Summer of Love in San Francisco. Was there any sort of impact around all of that with
you and your school? How was it?
MH:
Well, partly because I was rushing through—and I was in ROTC during the first two
years, so you couldn’t wear your uniforms to the ROTC building. Just a lot of protests, a
lot of noise. I’m not sure anybody knew what they were—they knew what they were
protesting, but it was kind of disorganized then. They really didn’t get to be really
organized until later.
But 1968, of course, was the really tough year with Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. And
I was living in Chicago, where the Democratic Convention took place, which was a
triggering point for a lot of this stuff, with our beloved Mayor Daley using firehoses on
protesters and whatnot. So it was very front and center, all of the agitation about it. And
the Vietnam War was a tragic war in many respects, but the way the country treated the
returning servicemen was just horrible.
SL:
Yes.
MH:
Including my brother.
SL:
I was going to ask about that, yeah. Was he in the Air Force in ‘68 at that time or…?
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�12
MH:
Not in ‘68. He was passionate about flying. I mean, we were all interested in flying, but
he was passionate about it. Went to the Air Force Academy and graduated in 1970. And,
of course, they were so gung-ho, they were afraid the Vietnam War would get over with
and they wouldn’t have their chance to get their ribbons and get promoted.
But he went into flying B-52s and was basically a—they call them radar observers, but he
was the navigator or bombardier. And the B-52 was based at Ellsworth. And did, I think,
three or four tours in Southeast Asia. They were being put on temporary assignment. His
wife at the time and family were living in South Dakota, but they would be on temporary
assignments to either Guam or Thailand. And he was in in December of 1972, which is
when President Nixon wanted to get the peace talks restarted, get the prisoners of war
home as the war was starting to wind down, and that’s when he ordered the all-out
bombing of North Vietnam for the first time. Bombing Hanoi, Haiphong Harbor, and
whatnot.
And so David was involved with, I think, three of those missions. And that’s when the
war got pretty serious for them. Prior to that, they had been doing, interestingly enough,
close ground support with the B-52, which sounds like an oxymoron, but that’s what they
were doing, and blowing up a lot of bridges and bamboo huts and stuff. But when they
went into Hanoi, supposedly the most heavily armed city anywhere with SAM missiles,
and that’s when we started losing B-52s. And he had a number of planes go down.
And it’s interesting. Jim Farmer, one of our other trustees, was a B-52 pilot, lost his
plane, but did not get captured because they nursed it along enough to get to where they
could be rescued. But those were pretty dramatic times for those folks. And that went on
for several weeks, really intense bombing in North Vietnam.
00:18:46
[Career with IBM]
SL:
Very much so. So at this time, you’re still—you’re kind of new to IBM at that point.
MH:
Right.
SL:
What were you doing? Were you in Chicago at the time [unintelligible]?
MH:
I was in Chicago, and I went into sales. I think partly my Greyhound training actually
said, you know, “Engineering is fine and you can do it, but it’s more fun to be talking to
people and doing other things.” And so I went into sales and marketing, and basically my
20 years at IBM were mostly sales and marketing. But I moved through a number of
positions, and we moved the family around. I went from Chicago to Detroit to White
Plains, New York, back to Chicago. Both my girls were born in Chicago, but on different
tours of duty. Then we went to St. Louis and finally ended up in Atlanta for eight years.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�13
And when I left IBM, I was the vice president of field operations. I basically had half the
country’s sales and customer support force. Which, interestingly enough, my father then
was working for me, technically, down in the organization a little bit, as was my sister,
who also worked for IBM, her husband, her ex-husband, my brother worked there for a
little bit after he got out of the service, and my sister-in-law was the last person standing.
She retired about, oh, I think, five years ago, also in Atlanta. So there was one Christmas
dinner I remember where six of the eight adults at the table worked for IBM, and my
mother and Mary Kay had to call a truce at least once an hour so we would quit talking in
these acronyms about computers. So we really have a great family history. My dad
worked for IBM for 49 years.
SL:
Wow.
MH:
I worked there for 20. My sister worked there for 25.
SL:
Oh, man. That’s a tremendous history with that company. And that had to have been a
huge growth time when your dad was there and when you were there?
MH:
Well, it was. And IBM is not as well-known now to young people, but in the ‘60s and
‘70s, it was kind of the premier computing company for almost anything. They had a
product line, the 360, the 370, all mainframe computers. Later in the ‘80s—and that’s
part of the reason I left—was they had kind of lost touch with their customers relative to
mini computers and distributed processing. But it was the premier company for
computing, but it was also a great training ground, if you will, for managers. They’re
really well known for the development of people and their executives. And it has a great
history.
And, of course, my dad’s history went all the way back to 1940 when they were actually
making machine guns for the war effort.
SL:
The war.
MH:
Right?
SL:
Wow.
MH:
And my first encounters were counting machines, mechanical counting machines, where
you didn’t program, you wired boards and plugboards in order to get the counting
machine to do what it was supposed to do. And that’s part of how IBM got its growth, is
it was the only company that could handle Social Security Administration.
SL:
I didn’t know that.
MH:
And the census. And so that’s kind of what their claim to fame was early on. Later it
became kind of the go-to company for computing for the ‘60s, ‘70s, and early part of the
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�14
‘80s. Still a very big company, but not anywhere near as well-known as some of the
others now.
SL:
No. And that’s where you ended up with a lot of your management training and skills, it
looks like.
MH:
Yes, yes.
SL:
That helped a lot.
MH:
It was a great company for developing managers and executives. A lot of training, a lot of
support. And then people did a lot of recruiting from them because it was kind of a
premier training ground for executives.
SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. Oh, I understand that one for sure. At the time I remember I kind
of wanted to go out to work for IBM, and then somebody told me that they acronym
stood for “I’ve Been Moved.”
MH:
Yes, that’s exactly what it was. And that’s when—in 1987, when IBM was kind of
struggling with what they wanted to do, I was vice president for basically half the
country’s revenue, about three-quarters of its geography for sales, but I was spending far
more time talking to IBM executives in New York than I was talking to customers. And
that struck me as just being wrong. There was something we weren’t connecting.
Now, the great thing was IBM actually invented, if you will, the PC at the time and got
into an arrangement with Microsoft to have Microsoft develop the operating system. And
that’s a whole different story as to how that marriage or engagement or whatever it was—
SL:
It was different. Yeah.
MH:
—was different, and ultimately ended up being a divorce before it was all over with. But
what gave us was—me, personally, the family—was access to this technology. We had
all the early PCs. And when Jennifer went off to boarding school, she had her PC with
her. And there’s actually an interesting article in one of the IBM internal publications of
Jennifer showing off some of her artwork where she had programmed in a product called
Logo how to draw a horse, which is her main avocation, with a computer as kind of
breakthrough technology. It looks pretty crude right now by today’s standards, but it was
kind of cool at the time.
So we’ve had—always had access to computers in the home, as have the children, and
it’s been a great benefit. They’ve all been—of course, everybody’s computer literate
now, but they were really ahead of their times in utilizing those—that kind of technology
in schools.
00:25:00
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�15
[Career with Boeing and Microsoft]
SL:
That’s a great benefit, yeah, for you and your family. And then you say in ‘87, is that
when you made the move?
MH:
Right. We were living in Atlanta. It looked like the next step would be go back to New
York, which we neither Mary Kay nor I wanted to do. We had moved too much, and we
didn’t want to go through another one of those. And I had basically—was questioning
IBM strategy. So I got a call from a recruiter who asked me about going to Boeing. And
at the time, Boeing Computer Services was headed up by a fellow by the name of Bob
Dryden, who had also worked for IBM. I knew him casually, not really well. So I went
out and interviewed and ultimately went to Boeing to run Boeing Computer Services’
external systems integration business.
There’s kind of an interesting history there, was in 1970s, when there was a real
downturn here—there’s a famous story about a billboard at the edge of town saying,
“Will the last person to leave Seattle turn off the lights?”—I mean, it was—IBM had—or,
excuse me, Boeing had laid off a number of people, and the powers-that-be had enough
insight to say, “Hey, these computer guys may actually be valuable in the future. Let’s
put them together in one place and let them go sell computing services. To the degree that
they can sell computing services, generate revenue, we can keep them in place.” And
that’s what they did. And then that actually built up about a half-billion-dollar systems
integration business. We had customers all over.
We ran the—I say “we.” It became “we” a little bit later. But they were running all the
computing operation at Hanford. They ran—had the China Lake Naval Weapons Center.
They had NASA’s Ground Communications. A number of other contracts—the New
York Police Department. But basically had these contracts external to Boeing and not
even in line with anything Boeing was doing at the time, other than generating revenue
and building a skill base, which was—became quite important later on.
So I went up to Boeing as—to run that business, but within about six months, Bob
Dryden, who I was working for at the time, got moved to be the number two person in
Wichita in the Defense Division, and I was quite honored to be named the new president
of Boeing Computer Services. I went from running this fairly small part of BCS to
running all of BCS.
Now, at the time, BCS was doing most of the computing operation for the whole
company, other than things that actually ended up on a product. We didn’t do
applications or computer software that actually ended up in an airplane
SL:
Sure.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�16
MH:
But everything else we did. And we had about 15,000 people. We ran a big telephone
network. You really get a whole different sense of customer satisfaction when you’re
responsible for the CEO’s dial tone. You get a lot of opportunities to be successful, and
you never want to fail in that.
SL:
You didn’t want to really mess it up?
MH:
Yeah. It only takes one to mess that up. But we were doing some really interesting work,
particularly—and what was really exciting to me was we had just started the—or the
company had just started the 777 development program. And this is kind of my one claim
to having been part of The Museum of Flight, actually, is the company had adopted
CATIA, which was a software product sold by IBM but developed by Dassault for
computer-aided design. And it was a very unique piece of software, 3D solid modeling.
The way historically you build airplanes was you had flat drawings trying to make
drawings of a surface that was both curved and highly complex. Very difficult to do. So
you ended up building a lot of prototypes and whatnot. Very long process. And the whole
idea here was to basically design and to a large degree test the plane on the computer
before you ever built one.
And the company had piloted this, kind of tested the practicality of it, by working on a
part of the airplane—power pack and strut, which is basically the engine and the
connection to the wing—which is interesting because everything goes through there. You
know, fuel, air, hydraulics, wiring and everything else, and just a very complex
structure—and had demonstrated the feasibility of that as a viable technology for airplane
design. And the only issue then was was to scale it up to a full airplane.
And so it was fun to be part of that project. And I take no credit for it because I was just
kind of overseeing the whole thing. But the 777 was the first airplane ever to be,
essentially, totally designed on the computer with a notion of having the first thing we
built actually fly, which it did. Ended up, I think, with first United and then Cathay
Pacific.
But what was fascinating to me was is that Boeing was making a major commitment to
the airplane. The engine manufacturers were making a major commitment to the engines.
IBM was selling software developed by and still controlled to a large extent by Dassault,
which was uncomfortably close to Airbus. And IBM was selling a lot of computers and
workstations. At one point in time, I think we had about 1800 engineering workstations
connected to a bunch of IBM mainframes to do it. And IBM, quite frankly, wasn’t
stepping up to the support structure.
So I remember early on I was able to get a meeting with John Akers, who was the CEO
of IBM at the time, who I had worked for in the past, and [Bert Woliver?], who was the
corporate engineering VP, and [Dean Cruise?], who was the corporate manufacturing VP,
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�17
and I went out and made the first customer presentation ever to the IBM executive board
and said, “Hey, guys, you know, the engine companies are betting a billion dollars to do
this, Boeing’s betting a billion dollars on the airplane, and we need you to step up.”
And so if you go to the Museum—or right below the theater there, where the wall and the
Great Gallery, is a display on what CATIA is all about, the awards that we won. And
what’s really fascinating, there’s a handwritten—or a copy of a handwritten letter, which
was done at a restaurant in New York with Frank Shrontz, the CEO of Boeing, John
Akers, the CEO of IBM, Bernard Charlès, who was the CEO of Dassault, without the
help of lawyers, saying, “Look, we’re committed to building this airplane on time, on
schedule, of the highest quality,” signed by all the executives.
And it was an interesting time in history. I didn’t stay at Boeing until we finally got the
plane flying, but it was interesting to be part of that. And I used to talk to Frank Shrontz a
lot about this and how it was going because we were investing huge amounts of money in
computing. And I finally said, “Look, I’m relatively new to the Boeing Company. From a
computing standpoint, we’ve got a lot of challenges to scale this thing up, but I think
they’re manageable. My personal opinion is it’s going to be a culture issue. Because to
make this work, you’ve got to bring everybody to the front of the process—the
aeronautical engineer, the manufacturing people, the guys from the factory, the people in
the field that are going to have to maintain this thing—and get them to sit down together
and design an airplane that both will fly well, can be manufactured efficiently, and can be
maintained in the field. And I’m not sure we, the Boeing Company, know how to do that.
The whole system doesn’t really tell you how you mix that kind of skillset together and
get it to function.”
But Alan Mulally was the chief engineer on it, and Phil Condit was the head of the
program, and they collectively basically made it work. And I would say that—almost
without a doubt, most people will say that the 777 was the best program that Boeing’s
had ever, including some of the new ones. Fewer engineering changes, very few
problems, very popular airplane. They built almost 2,000 of them.
SL:
Wow. So you really were changing during the change from paper and pencil and drafting
and—
MH:
Absolutely.
SL:
—small calculator type work—
MH:
Slide rules.
SL:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. It would have been a fascinating time.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�18
MH:
It was. It was. You know, the design goal—I mean, an airplane is a very complicated
thing to build. As somebody said, a 747 is several million parts flying in close formation.
But it’s not a simple project to do and to do it quickly and to do it cost effectively. So the
goal we had was to reduce the number of engineering changes after we got the airplane
out and to get the plane profitable faster by speeding the whole process up.
SL:
That makes sense. And you were there until around probably—I think it was around the
time you came onto The Museum of Flight.
MH:
1990.
SL:
Okay.
MH:
Yeah, I was—much to my surprise, I got a call one day saying, “Have you ever thought
about being the president of Microsoft?” And I said, “Nope. Haven’t thought about that at
all.”
SL:
[laughs] “Why would I?” Yeah.
MH:
Well, Microsoft was a much smaller company then. They were maturing to the point
where they were no longer an individual user hobbyist kind of business. A lot of big
companies were using the software and PCs, including the Boeing Company. We were
Microsoft’s biggest customer at the time. But we were also everybody’s biggest
customer. We were Apple’s biggest customer and so on and so forth. And Microsoft was
struggling with their relationship with IBM, and I guess I was viewed as being somebody
who knew about IBM but was far enough removed from it with my time at Boeing not to
be an IBM-biased.
SL:
Right.
MH:
And at the time, Microsoft—I think we had about 5,000 employees and a little bit less
than—I guess we made our first billion-dollar revenue year in 1990, if I’m not mistaken.
So it was a much smaller company, and my task was to try to build a relationship with
large customers to use the software to try to change Microsoft’s policies and practices as
it relates to that kind of software. Prior to that, if you wanted to have DOS licensed on a
PC, you had to have a piece of paper that was the license that literally was next to the PC.
Boeing was moving PCs around like crazy and trying to keep track of them. So there
were a lot of policies and practices that needed to be addressed to make it practical for
large customers.
00:37:23
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�19
[Interest in aviation and education and involvement with The Museum of Flight]
SL:
I’ll say. Yeah, it would have been an interesting transition time as well. But that’s
something I didn’t really kind of get into earlier, was what sparked your interest in
aviation? Because you’ve gone from Boeing now and then become this massive force at
The Museum of Flight.
MH:
Well, I don’t know why I got asked to be a trustee, to be perfectly honest with you, other
than the fact I was getting some visibility in the press and was probably whoever Trip’s
[Trip Switzer] predecessor was was to say, “Hey, here’s somebody who might want to
financially contribute.”
But I’ve always been interested in aviation, with my dad’s history, my father-in-law’s
history, my brother’s history. It’s always sort of fascinated me, and my interest was both
historical. I was really focused on World War II-kind of history. So the Museum looked
like a good place to be. And for the first several years I was a trustee but wasn’t really
terribly active. I mean, I went to the meetings and so on and so forth. But I went through
several years in the ‘90s as a trustee and began to get to know the Museum a lot better.
And the real transformation was—and I can’t remember the exact year—I was asked to
head up the Exhibit Committee. And we were starting to work—I say “we.” It was Chris
Mailander and the team—were basically dealing with the Champlin collection of
airplanes, the fighter collection, and designing the Personal Courage Wing. And that
project, which I take no credit for—I was certainly not a creative force behind it—was
really transformational to me. Because prior to that, when I first joined the Museum
board, we basically had the Great Gallery and the Red Barn. It was a great place for
aviation enthusiasts. We had airplanes, we had signage to tell how fast they flew, when
they were made, so on and so forth. But it was basic for airplane nuts, I’ll call them, to
visit.
The Personal Courage Wing did two things for me. It basically began to tell the story
built around the airplanes. What’s the historical context of these airplanes? Who built
them? What were some of the technologies that were advancing—that were being
advanced at the time? What was the impact on the war on the acceleration of technology,
both wars? And so we started to tell stories in a way that I thought was terrific, but more
importantly, it appealed to a much broader audience.
And the other thing related to that is it started to talk about people. We’re not dealing
with inanimate objects, an airplane. We’re dealing with the people who flew them. We’re
dealing with the people who designed them. And what came out of that when we opened
that in the—in 2004 and we saw people go through, including my own family, my own
children, I began to realize that people don’t know very much about what happened in the
first half of the last century. They went through two World Wars, a Depression, moved
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�20
right into the Cold War. I mean, I can remember in the Cold War practicing at school
getting under my desk in case of a nuclear attack. I don’t know what people thought
was—I was going to—how I was going to be saved by doing that, but we did it. My
father had a plan to put a bomb shelter in the backyard, for Pete’s sakes.
SL:
I remember those days.
MH:
You know? Fortunately, it never got implemented. But basically, we had a generation,
my children, as well as others, who knew nothing about—or very little about what went
on. And yet a lot of the problems we’re dealing with even today arose out of the things
that happened between 1900 and the ‘50s or ‘60s. You know, a lot of the boundaries in
the Middle East were basically created out of the post-war era. Certainly the relationship
with Russia was developed out of that and ultimately China.
And so to me, the whole Personal Courage Wing involvement really got me—my juices
running relative to the value of the Museum, not just as a collector of artifacts, but as a
place to tell stories and to educate people on what happened and, more importantly, why
it’s relevant today, what the impact is for today.
SL:
That makes really good sense because the Personal Courage Wing is one that people go
into it without knowing an awful lot about it. And a lot of them don’t even go up to
World War I, unfortunately. But the technology changes are all people stories.
MH:
Absolutely.
SL:
And it’s a fascinating history for that.
MH:
Sure.
SL:
Is that what kind of got you into the education side of the Museum or was that—
MH:
Well, I’ve always been interested in education. When you have kids, you sort of deal with
that. I always liked school. I was a voracious reader. And as we saw people come through
the Museum and you began to get a sense of, quite frankly, an education system that
wasn’t working well for a lot of people, particularly some of the underserved
communities, it just became really foremost in my mind—I mean, I—we’ve supported
the schools we’ve been involved with for a long time. We’ve got a faculty fund at the
University of Michigan, where there’s six Hallman Fellows running around doing
whatever college professors do.
But the point of it is is that education is fundamental to a successful society. The more we
can advance the skillset of everybody, the better off we’re going to be. And I think a lot
of the issues we’re facing right now are weak education system. But part of that’s just
motivating people, so we—I think the value of the Museum is something where you can
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�21
basically tell people not only what’s going on, but particularly the STEM areas, the
science, technology, engineering stuff, are interesting things to do. They’re fun things to
do. There’s a lot of jobs there. And when we look at our education programs with
Washington Aerospace Scholars and others, you really can get people excited about it.
Back about—oh, I think it was about nine, ten years ago, through a mutual friend, Mary
Kay and I got involved with a school down in Shelton, Washington, the Mountain View
Elementary School, where we knew the fourth grade science teacher. And without going
into a lot of detail, Shelton is kind of a tough community. It’s basically a mill town. A lot
of these kids have never been out of the county. Very few have ever been on an airplane.
A lot of them were dealing with family issues. And so Mary Kay and I started bringing
their fourth grade class up every May to the Museum for a field trip. At the time, they
couldn’t use the buses to go on field trips. They couldn’t afford it. So we would bring,
120 fourth graders up to the Museum to spend a day at the Museum.
And the school didn’t view it as just a field trip. They put the curriculum together. The
librarian helped them. The English department—English teachers had them write stories
about it. The science teacher talked about aviation and so on and so forth. So these kids
came up very well prepared. Docents normally are terrified when you tell them that we’re
bringing in 120 fourth graders.
SL:
[laughs] True.
MH:
“Could you make sure they have a good day?” These kids came in, were very polite, very
well behaved, asked great questions. [laughs] We had them go up and we had—served
them lunch, had McCormick and Schmick’s cater a lunch for fourth graders, which is a
whole interesting process on having McCormick and Schmick put together baloney
sandwiches, turkey sandwiches, cheese sandwiches. [laughs] And the kids loved it. There
was tablecloths up in the room that we had it in. And these kids thought this was really
cool. And they served—we served juice and water in the water goblets. They thought
they were drinking out of wine glasses. Those kids got so excited about that. Every time
an airplane took off from the field, right, they would all run to the windows. The building
would start to tip over that way.
But we did that for seven years right up into COVID. And about a month later, Mary Kay
and I would always get a thank-you book. Every one of them had to write a thank you
letter to us. Even the kids that didn’t get to go because they didn’t complete all their
assignments had to write a thank-you note for taking their schoolmates [unintelligible]. “I
heard it was great. Thank you very much for taking care of our—”
So, unfortunately, COVID interrupted with that, and obviously thing and staff changed
and whatnot, so I don’t know whether we’ll continue that. But that just showed me that
the Museum isn’t going to teach everybody calculus or trig or anything like that, but if
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�22
we can keep these kids motivated, stay in school, there’s a lot of good jobs here, the more
you study, the more you’re going to be able to advance yourself and your families. And
besides that, it’s fun. It’s fun. And so that’s what we’re trying to accomplish. And to me,
that’s a lot of what we’re doing. We are now getting more into classes that actually are—
have educational accomplishments and goals. But I think the real value is to be a place
where no matter what your interest, you can come to The Museum of Flight, find
multiple things to do, and really have fun doing it. And our kids loved to do it. They used
to go to The Museum of Flight and throw parachutes off the balconies and whatnot. And
so it’s really a—just an exciting thing to see, and we just need to continue to do more of
it.
SL:
It sounds like you’ve been very heavily involved in that, in the Challenger Learning
Center, in the Michael Anderson [referring to the Michael P. Anderson Memorial
Aerospace Program], all of that, and it’s very appreciated.
MH:
Yeah. Even like my oldest granddaughter, Sarah, she would bring her friends to the
Museum, initially just for the fun part of it. And when I was interim CEO, I also had the
keys, so she could go down in the basement and see that stuff. But she would—got into
the library and archives one time, and they started showing her some of the things we had
in the vault, right? The photographic plates from the Wright Brothers being in Paris in
1908. And she could relate to the fact that that person who took that picture had to be
there. Unlike her iPhone, you know, the picture didn’t just come from somebody.
And so she got really interested in that, would bring friends back, and would always want
to go to the library and archives, which for a teenager, that’s not like a normal place to
go. But it just showed me that we’ve got so much down there, and I’m not sure we’re
using it all as effectively as we could to try to stimulate people’s interest. And now she’s
down at the University of Portland studying to be an elementary school teacher.
SL:
Oh, that’s wonderful.
MH:
Yeah.
SL:
Yeah. That’s very cool. I heard something about—that they had a nickname for the
Museum?
MH:
Well, yes. [laughs] As you progress forward in time and I became the interim CEO,
somebody Photoshopped a picture, which I don’t think we have around here anymore, of
me standing in front of the Museum, and they had Photoshopped “Grandpa’s Museum”
over the door, so…
SL:
[laughs] I didn’t realize it went to the extent of a photograph.
MH:
Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. It’s Grandpa’s Museum. [laughs]
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�23
SL:
I think that’s awesome. That’s what it should be. It should be that to anybody. It should
be that familiar and that fun of a place to go.
MH:
Yeah.
SL:
Yeah. Well, that’s very cool. There’s all kinds of little things about that. I’m kind of
curious about, obviously, the Exhibits Committee and how long you were on there and
what happened during your tenure on there.
MH:
Well, on the Exhibits Committee, I think I was the chairman—or involved with it for 10
or 15 years. I don’t really know. It seemed like forever. And, you know, it’s really that
staff that does the great job. I basically just ran interference for them and make sure that
their projects were reasonable and they got the right kind of budget. But they’re so
creative on how do you display and use these artifacts as not just what the artifact is but
what it meant. So I did that for a number of years.
But if you look at some of the things we did—I can’t remember the exact year—for
example, we had the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit, which was a traveling exhibit. We had to
actually pay for it and therefore sell tickets. We had never done that before. So our board
at the time was pretty conservative. It was mostly Boeing engineers. And so the notion of
going out and paying somebody to bring an exhibit in on Leonardo da Vinci, where
they—wasn’t necessarily the connection was quite as tight as other things. But when we
did that—and it was a very successful effort. I think that was like in 2007. I can’t
remember the exact date. But it was really an eye-opener because we attracted people that
ordinarily would not come to the Museum to see this display of models and da Vinci’s
inventions or designs and some of his paintings and whatnot.
There’s a great picture of me with one of the grandkids—Sarah, I think it was—holding
hands looking at the Mona Lisa on the wall there. But it demonstrated that, number one,
we can do things that are related to our broader mission—not just airplanes, but education
and science—and we can attract people to come in and pay to see it. And so it was kind
of an eye-opener for us. And the first time we ever did it was successful. We’ve done it
since then. You can’t do it with everything. It has to be somewhat related to what we’re
doing. But it was an interesting project.
SL:
When you were on the committee at the time that came through then—or that you helped
put that together. How about Personal Courage Wing? You were involved in that or in
selection of the airplanes or anything like that?
MH:
Well, not the selection of the airplanes we were started with and I—we were doing—was
working with Chris Mailander, who headed up the exhibit team to put it together. As I
say, I take no credit for any creative stuff here. My role was just to keep pushing them
and to keep pushing the Museum to do more stuff with it. I think it was a great success. I
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�24
mean, people go to The Museum of Flight and come away with, it’s the most interesting
part. If they get in there. The Museum’s gotten so big, we’ve got to now figure out how
to navigate through it in a meaningful way, depending on peoples’ interests.
SL:
That is more difficult.
MH:
And that’s a challenge. It really is. It really has gotten to be huge. It’s not a one day, you
know, “Let’s go down to The Museum of Flight for a couple hours and get that off our
checklist.”
SL:
Right. We do get a lot of folks that are there for an hour and, “What can you show me in
an hour?” Well, not much.
MH:
Right.
SL:
That’s difficult.
MH:
It’s hard.
SL:
Very much so.
00:54:28
[Experiences as Museum’s interim CEO]
SL:
Well, I know you were—and have been kind of given some kudos around the transition
when the economy went down the tubes back in ‘08, ‘09, that era.
MH:
‘08. That was really a tough time. We hadn’t fully paid for the Personal Courage Wing
because pledges hadn’t come in, the stock market turned down. We had to do—I think it
was across the board pay cut for the staff at ten percent. That didn’t go down well. But it
was better than layoffs. But it really caused a number of issues. Kevin Callahan was my
predecessor. I was vice chairman of the board at the time in 2008 and ‘09. And Kevin
Callahan was the chairman, and we clearly had both economic stress in the Museum but
also a fairly severe morale problem for the obvious reason we started getting pay cuts.
And so the Executive Committee was caught off guard and not really quite as attuned as
they should have been to what was going on in the bowels of the organization. Some of
our donors were.
And so we basically made a CEO change at the time. Bonnie Dunbar had done a great job
of getting us focused on space because it concurred with all the stuff we were—decided
to compete for, this one of the flown Space Shuttles as that program began to wind down.
And to do that, part of the RFP [Request for Proposal] said we had to build a building, so
we were trying to get the Space Gallery built. I think we completed that in 2011.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�25
Anyway, we—the Executive Committee, or a subset of them, decided that we ought to—
we needed to deal with this morale issue, and we wanted to make a CEO change. It was
kind of the end of Bonnie’s five-year term there. And so I made the mistake of going out
to go to the restroom or take a phone call. When I came back, I found myself as the
interim CEO of the Museum and was told that it’s not a bad job. Just go down there a
couple days a week, smile, sign some papers, and make all this transition stuff go
smoothly. Go start the search for a new CEO. Don’t have any glass break. Make sure the
morale improves, nobody leaves. It did not turn out to be a one-or-two-day-a-week job,
so I was basically, for most of 2010, the fulltime CEO of The Museum of Flight.
SL:
Oh, yeah.
MH:
Which was interesting. And I’ve never viewed myself as an airplane guy. I mean, I’m a
computer guy that got lost one day and ended up at The Museum of Flight. But anyway,
here I am now as the CEO. And we had to deal with a number of issues, most of which
are fairly easy to fix. My first staff meeting I had, I said, “Look, I don’t know anything
about museums, so don’t come to me with museum-specific things. But if you got an
issue, I will turn it around in two days, if at all possible. So you’re going to get answers
on whatever your questions are. I’m not going to rewrite your letters, so do them right the
first time and they’ll go out. We’re going to start having any meetings that I have with the
staff, not in my office, but in the department’s office.”
So first day I was there, I went over to, actually, the Exhibit Committee area over in the
904 building and visited the library and archives. The CEO actually shows up in the
library and archives. That was sort of an amazing event.
SL:
A very different culture then. It really—
MH:
It really was. It really was. I would never have lunch in my office. I would always eat
somewhere else, down in the cafeteria, and I then would walk around and talk to people.
Mostly docents. I mean, docents are very easy to talk to and will tell you what’s going on.
They’re not worried about a pay cut, they’re not worried about losing their job, and so
they are very vocal, very specific, and usually know what’s going on. And so it was kind
of an interesting year.
We started the search. Actually, it was two searches. The first search we decided we
weren’t getting—we were getting a more traditional candidate, somebody who had been
in the industry before, aeronautics and whatnot. I said, “We’ve got to aim higher. We
need to take this as an opportunity to be truly transformational and do something really
different.” And so we ended up going down and recruiting Doug King from the St. Louis
Science Center, who had—early in his career, had been marketing the Challenger
Learning Centers, was running a science center, not an airplane museum, had some
relationship with McDonnell Douglas, which became an important part of the Boeing
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�26
Company at the time. And we felt that he could really kind of redirect us into a, if you’ll
have them, bigger dreams. And that’s kind of why we did that.
So anyway, I was interim CEO for a year. That’s when I had the keys, and that’s when
the grandkids really thought I was cool because I could open any door and wander around
the storage areas.
SL:
That would be more fun than I can count. I love that.
MH:
The key to make the elevator go all the way up to the top floor. I mean, it was kind of a
fun time.
SL:
The little things. Yeah.
MH:
Yeah. And we’re doing some cool stuff. The Wyckoff Bridge had been put in to go
across the street. We are starting the work on the Space Gallery to compete for the flown
Shuttle. And so it really was a kind of a transformational time for the Museum.
SL:
Well, your expertise, you’ve managed other areas with IBM and Boeing through some
tough transitional periods, so I can see why if you stepped out of the room, you got the
job.
MH:
Well, I don’t know why I did. I don’t know what happened there. The lesson there is
never leave the room when important stuff like that’s going on. You’ve got to make sure
you represent yourself in that. In all fairness, I was retired at the time. After I left
Microsoft, I had kind of a consulting practice. I had more flexibility on time. And the
experience I had was managing large organizations, complex organizations. So it was
really funny, the first meeting I had after I became interim CEO was a meeting between
Chris Mailander and the curator at the time—
SL:
Dennis [Dennis Parks]?
MH:
Well, it was not Dennis. It was—
SL:
Dan?
MH:
Dan [Dan Hagedorn]. Anyway, it was to resolve how we were going to mount the P-51.
The traditional view, the National Air and Space Museum view, is mounted on the
ground so that you can see it in it’s more normal position. Chris had the view that we
ought to mount it on a pedestal like it was landing, partly because we needed the space
and whatnot. I said, “So what do you want me to do?” [laughs] I said, “You two go off
and resolve that and to just let me know what happened.” And I think part of it was the P51 was blocking the access to some storage room down in the Personal Courage Wing.
And I said, “Look, I’m not a museum guy, and this is way out of my paygrade to figure
this one out.” And I don’t know when it ever got resolved. As a matter of fact, I think it
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�27
has just gotten resolved in the last couple years, so it was not apparently an easy thing to
solve.
SL:
I think it was a compromise. For several years it was on the ground, and then after Dan
retired—
MH:
But the point of it is is the Museum behaves—it’s a bunch of silos, highly specialized
groups, whether it be development or archives or exhibits and whatnot. And we had to
make the groups work together to get this whole thing functioning right. And we made
enormous progress on that. But that’s a skillset that I brought to the process, is I had
managed large organizations before, and it’s all about communication. You give people
clear direction, you give them the right tools, and then get out of their way and make
them successful. The people will be successful on their own. You don’t have to
micromanage them.
When I was at Boeing, BCS looked like a computing company, not like the Boeing
Company. We were ten years—average age was ten years younger. We had far more
women, particularly women in management. I think we had about a third of the women
that were in management in the Boeing Company, and we were like one-tenth of the
population. We did things like actually have personal performance plans, goals for the
year, evaluations tied to your pay. I never heard of a toteming system until I got to
IBM—got to Microsoft—got to Boeing, where you basically rank your staff and started
lopping off the bottom of it. That just didn’t make sense to me. But anyway.
SL:
Yeah. That’s how it was at GE to some degree. You had management, but that bottom ten
percent was generally gone every year.
MH:
Yeah. As I used to tell people, a top executive every once in a while will ask what time it
is. And the organization responds to that. And somebody in the bowels of the
organization is giving me the Fort Collins exact time, and then they say, “Well, he might
ask that question again,” and before you know it, we’ve got a clock factory being built in
the basement. And all I wanted to know was what time it was.
SL:
I never thought about it that way.
MH:
Well, that’s the way it worked to a large degree.
SL:
Yeah. That’s interesting. So it sounds like really during your time as CEO, there was a
transition almost in how the board and the staff worked together, it seems like?
MH:
Well, I wouldn’t call it—I don’t know if it’s specific change. But the whole Museum was
changing. We were becoming far more focused on education. Developing the stuff on the
other side of the street was quite important. Competing for the Space Gallery, taking the
gamble that we will compete for that and even build a building for it with no assurance
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�28
that we’re going to get it, but we were complying with an RFP that said you had to be
able to have a place to store it, display it near a 10,000-foot runway. We concluded we’re
the only people that could actually do that, and so we took a chance and built a building
with the Space Gallery. I think most people know that the back of that building could
come off to slide it in there.
We were doing more marketing. So the whole organization was starting to evolve, focus
on education, figuring out how to be more relevant to a broader community, related to
what we were doing, aviation and STEM learning and stuff like that, but be—move way
beyond just being a museum in the classical sense of the word.
01:06:51
[Story about Captain Joe Kimm and interest in oral histories]
SL:
Something that you had mentioned in your—kind of the preliminary questionnaire we go
through that I don’t really know anything about, which is why I probably shouldn’t ask
the question.
MH:
But you’ll do it anyway.
SL:
But Captain Joe Kimm. I don’t know what the story is there.
MH:
Joe Kimm. Well, actually, Joe—as you know, Mary Kay and I have sponsored the oral
history program for quite some time.
SL:
Yes.
MH:
What triggered that was I was also on the board of Emerald Heights, which is a senior
community here in Redmond. And when I was down there, I got introduced to Joe Kimm,
who was at the time—this would have been—oh, gosh—seven, eight, maybe ten years
ago—he was almost 100, but very active. And whoever introduced me said, “Well, Joe
Kimm knew Amelia Earhart.” I said, “Really?”
So I went down and talked to Joe Kimm, and there was a very interesting story where
Northwest Airlines in 1933 was trying to basically develop air routes from Minneapolis
west to Seattle. Now, this was in the days of the Ford Trimotor, right, and everybody was
flying VFR, visual flight rules, which means you had to be able to see where you were
going because that was the only way to get there. And you had to be able to find the
passes in the mountains to get over the Rockies, and nobody had done it before.
And so Joe Kimm started out, I think, in 19—I want to say ‘25 or something—first as a—
I’m not sure what he did initially, but eventually he became a copilot for Northwest. And
the CEO of Northwest decided we’re going to go kind of pioneer this route, and to get
some publicity, we’re going to take Amelia Earhart, who had began to develop some
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�29
fame, along for the ride. And we’ll do it as a PR route, and we’ll go from Minneapolis to
Fargo to Bismarck to Helena and whatnot, and we’ll stop along the way and so on and so
forth.
Anyway, so Joe Kimm is the copilot of—on this flight. They were pretty good going all
the way over until they got to—I think it was Helena. The weather turned bad. They were
determined to push through and literally were trying passes and following the Clark
[Fork] River over in Spokane. And the weather got so bad with a snowstorm and
whatnot, they basically had to stop in Spokane and were clearly going to be snowed in for
a few days. And Joe was told to go down and find appropriate hotel accommodations for
the party, including Amelia Earhart.
So he went down to the—I think it was the Davenport Hotel in Spokane. They said, “We
need your best room.” And they said, “Sure, we’ve got a suite. It’s got a bedroom and a
dining room and whatnot.” It was 75 dollars a night. And so they all went to—had a big
dinner down there while they were waiting out the snowstorm before they proceeded on
to Seattle.
Well, Joe took a picture of Amelia Earhart—so he spent like several days with her.
Anyway, he took a picture on his Brownie camera, and even when I saw him eight or
nine years ago, he had Amelia Earhart’s picture taped to a cabinet in his kitchen. So I
thought that was an interesting story. This guy’s not going to write about it. Why not go
out and videotape him?
And that’s really how I got interested in the whole notion of oral history. So we have a lot
of great people who are not likely to write their stories, but maybe they’ll talk about
them. And if we can somehow capture these things in a way that makes them usable as a
reference, where we can literally index it and so on and so forth, to be able to go and
retrieve it on whatever topic it is, there’s value there. We had a lot of people, trustees of
the Museum, that we have been able to capture since we started that program. And that’s
why—that’s how I got interested in oral history and why Mary Kay and I continue to
support that program.
SL:
I always wondered quite what that was. I knew there was some Amelia Earhart
connection, but I didn’t know what it was.
MH:
Well, Captain Kimm was quite—I mean, even at 90, he was skiing. And he was a pilot
with Northwest right up until jets entered the pictures in the ‘60s. And he wanted to be
trained on jets to qualify there, but he was close to retirement and they wouldn’t do it, so
he basically decided to retire and go off and do something else. But he was a pretty
colorful character. Even at 90, he was a pretty colorful character.
SL:
Yeah, it sounds like he was.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�30
MH:
And so I think he was oral history number one in the list of things.
SL:
Oh, that’s awesome. I’d like to look at that one. I’ll have to see that at some point. We
have—on Sunday, there’s two docents that worked for Northwest—or, well, docent and
gallery ambassador. Darlene worked there for 48 years and started out in DC-4s, so she
might actually know him.
MH:
Good.
SL:
It would be fun to talk to her and just see what stories she has.
01:12:27
[Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park]
SL:
You also, I think, were involved in the building of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Park
that we have here, too.
MH:
Well, you know, we had that—we had a B-52 that was on loan to us parked up at Paine
Field in Everett for 15 or 16 years, and once a year we’d have to go out and have
somebody inspect it to make sure it wasn’t fully armed and carrying nuclear weapons.
But beyond that, it was—nobody could see it. It literally was in the middle of one of the
fields up there. And I got to talking to Jim Farmer one day. He was down in the cafeteria
and was clearly frustrated with trying to figure out what to do. Because he was, as you
know, a B-52 pilot. How do we display this airplane? Can we move it somewhere close
to the Restoration Center? At one point in time, there was at least some drawings on,
well, let’s cut the nose off and put the nose in the Great Gallery.
And I said, “Jim, we don’t want to do that. Keep going.” I had no creative idea on what to
do with it because I really didn’t know. I mean, it was an airplane. It’s huge. Huge. I
mean, at one point in time, there was a plan to put it over the entrance to the Museum
elevated so you would have to drive under it, which didn’t seem like a particularly good
idea.
In any event, they came up with a plan to display it out behind the Aviation Pavilion. And
we had a couple iterations of that. And anyway, that evolved into a, “Let’s raise the
money and put it down there intact if we can do it.” Part of it is just the size. And let’s
expand it just from not just a B-52 display, but let’s use it as a way to recognize our
Vietnam vets. And so that evolved into what it was. Again, I have no creative
responsibility for it other than being a cheerleader for it on raising the money to do it.
And I think it’s been really a tremendously important thing. I mean, there was some
question, well, if we put it back there, will anybody ever going to look at it? And it’s
amazing to me. Every time I go to the Museum, I’ll drive back there, and there will
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�31
always be somebody reading the signage. You can tell that they’re of the era of Vietnam.
We had some, I think, 3,500 people at the dedication, which was a fantastic event. My
brother was there giving guided tours of the airplane, where did he sit and telling amazing
stories. The plane was actually an Ellsworth plane. He may have flown it, actually, when
he was up at Ellsworth, that plane.
It was the original crew that actually got this thing going that came back for a reunion
and said, “This plane’s just sitting out here. Let’s do something about it.” And they were
instrumental in prodding the Museum to do something more. And people really got
caught up in it, in the opportunity to put both the exhibit over in the Great Gallery, plus
having the airplane out there.
As my brother pointed out, the bombardier and the navigator for the B-52, he said—he
had multiple tours of duty—sat in a windowless compartment of the plane facing
backwards. [laughs] And so their tour of Vietnam was done by looking at the radar
screen. The head for the plane was actually down behind their compartment so that—
periodically the flight crew would come down and say, “How do you guys take—stand it
out here? I mean, you can’t see anything.” He said, “Well, just make sure you takeoff
okay, because if we ever have to eject, our seats fire down, and you’ve got to at least get
up to some level of altitude to give us a chance to do it.” [coughs] And they were flying
out of Guam, and Guam has basically a cliff at the end of the runway, which is good
because these airplanes were taking off fully loaded—[coughs]—both bombs and fuel, to
make what turned out to be—I think it was like a 14-hour roundtrip mission, including
one refueling stop, to drop a load of bombs on Vietnam.
So it was a wonderful tribute to all the veterans. And I’m really proud of the Museum for
doing that.
SL:
It’s certainly been well received. We do have a lot of folks that go over there and talk
about it. I know there’s several of the people on there are very well known to the
Museum or work there, are docents there.
MH:
Right. Well, I think the Museum’s done a great job in recognizing veterans in all forms. I
mean, we always do something for Veterans Day, Armed Forces Day. We replace the
flags.
As part of my work at the University of Michigan, I knew the vice president of
development there quite well, and he came out to the Museum a number of times because
his father was a—flew in B-17s during the war, was shot down over Germany, spent 18
months in a prisoner-of-war camp. And the opportunity to see the airplane that his father
flew in, as well as I got to talk to his father, thank him for his service, which I think is one
of the jobs we have and need to continue to have, to recognize our service people. The
country doesn’t appreciate what we do. I mean, when—once we got out of Vietnam, we
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�32
just really don’t do enough recognition of what these service people do. And it’s in many
ways a thankless job that doesn’t pay well, has its dangers, but it’s quite important.
SL:
Right. I had the opportunity this last week to take one of those Vietnam service pins—
MH:
Cool.
SL:
—and the award down to a person in Texas. He had never even heard of it before. But he
flew 101s and 102s in the early 1960s.
MH:
Oh, yeah.
SL:
So that right era. And he really appreciated it.
MH:
Oh, yeah. No, it’s—and there’s just some great history there.
01:19:20
[Relationship with Bill Boeing Jr.]
SL:
To be able to do it is wonderful. Yeah. One other thing that I find interesting: back in
2011, you were able to give the—
MH:
2011. [laughs]
SL:
You were able to give the Red Barn Award—
MH:
To Bill Boeing
SL:
—to Bill Boeing.
MH:
Oh, yeah.
SL:
And then now, you have received that Red Barn Award.
MH:
Yes. I think I’m one of four—
SL:
One of four. Yeah.
MH:
—that have gotten it. Well, you know, Bill Boeing was just an amazing person. I had met
him prior to becoming the interim CEO but didn’t know him well. And as we went
through that transitional period, tough financial situation, transition to a new CEO,
improving the morale, it was very clear that he both understood the problems and wasn’t
very happy with everything that was going on here. So part of my job, besides coming in
and smiling and signing a few letters, was to try to build the trust and confidence in Bill.
So I would go down once or twice, sometimes three times a month, as long as I bought
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�33
the sandwiches, we would either sit in his office downtown or, when he moved home, at
his kitchen table, and we’d talk about the Museum. And I learned a great deal from him.
And he had a memory that was unbelievable. I mean, he literally could remember
things—he remembered when Boeing Field was dedicated, and he was just a little kid. I
think it was 1928 or something. He was sitting on the podium when his dad was doing
some of the ribbon-cutting stuff. I mean, he rescued the Red Barn for the Museum, which
is really the first Museum building. His father had bought it for a dollar in order to have a
building to build the B&W, his floatplane. And as Bill said, “My dad bought it for a
dollar, and I spent a million dollars to get it moved to the Museum.” I said, “Well, Bill,
it’s a great investment.”
In any event, I got to know Bill quite well, and he was a wonderful mentor and resource
to learn about early aviation, the role airplanes played in the— really, in the development
of the world. So I was quite honored to be a recipient of the Red Barn Award. As I say,
I’m not an airplane guy. I’m a computer guy. And so it was quite the honor and to know
Bill and to really learn from him. He was a remarkable person. A tremendous supporter
of the Museum.
But he was kind of funny. He bailed us out of a couple of financial difficulties there in
the—that we were talking about in 2008. But I was up on Whidbey Island. We have a
home—a second home on Whidbey Island, and he would call up and say, “Mike, I need
you to come down and pick up a check for the Museum.” And I would say, “Oh, Bill, it’s
a ferry [unintelligible].” He said, “No, I’d like you to pick it up.” Which he always did.
And so he would go down, and he’d take a—I think, one time, a 12 million dollar check
down to the Museum. And I would always drop it off at Matt Hayes’ desk and ask to be
reimbursed for parking in kind of a casual way. [laughs]
But we went through a situation there during 2008, I think it was, where we had a line of
credit, I think, with Bank of America that was kind of leftover financing from the
Personal Courage Wing. And Bank of America came in one day and said, “Well, we
don’t think not-for-profits are particularly good investments, so we’re canceling your
loan.” And Bill Boeing got so mad. And he said, “Well, I use Wells Fargo. I’ll get it set
up. Wells Fargo will carry it.” And then later on, he basically paid that off anyway. He
was a great friend of the Museum, and he’s a—had great insight, both on the industry and
to what we were doing, was always interested in education and always interested in
young people.
01:24:05
[Philanthropy and legacy]
SL:
That’s cool. That’s a great story to hear.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�34
MH:
Yeah.
SL:
I never had the opportunity to meet him, unfortunately.
MH:
Oh no.
SL:
[unintelligible]
MH:
Yeah.
SL:
And that kind of leads me kind of towards the wrapping up of this thing. But part of what
you do, what you’ve been able to do, is an awful lot of philanthropy, a significant
amount, everywhere you’ve lived. And I don’t know that you want to get into specifics
on any of that, but I just kind of like your philosophy, to hear a little bit about why you
want to do this. There’s so much that you do for so many—such a wide range. And like
you say, you’re not an airplane guy, but we’re a big recipient of your generosity.
MH:
Well, you know, we’ve been—I’ve been very fortunate. I couldn’t have planned a better
career. I worked for three great companies at different stages of their evolution. I was
very fortunate to get into—involved with the computer industry in its infancy, back when
computing really took off with IBM, and got to see that whole industry evolve in the way
it has. And people don’t realize [unintelligible] they don’t realize history relative to the
aviation. They don’t realize the history of computing. When I started with IBM, memory
for the 360 was in a big box. The reason it’s called Core is exactly what it was, was iron
core, something that weighs a ton. So a 256 K of memory times eight—or actually nine
little iron rings, that’s what Core was. 256 K of memory we rented for $10,000 a month.
Now, nobody will believe you when you tell them that, but that’s what it was.
But I got to see that industry evolve. I got to participate in the aviation industry with my
time with Boeing and through The Museum of Flight. My consulting practice, I was on
the board of Intuit, for example, TurboTax. I had a 19-year relationship with Fujitsu,
which was like the IBM of Japan, and I got to know the executives there quite well.
And so we got lucky, but we’re basically the same family with its roots, in my case, in
Wilmington, Delaware, and in Mary Kay’s case, in a farm in Indiana. And so particularly
with children and young women, education was important, and that’s where most of our
philanthropy goes. University of Michigan, the Museum, the various schools. We gotten
involved with Evergreen Hospital of late, trying to put resources in there. So we live very
comfortably. And we’ve tried to teach philanthropy to the kids, so that we have a donoradvised fund and we have a separate donor-advised fund that we use for matching gifts
for the kids and grandchildren’s giving. So long as they put up their own money, they can
get some of Grandpa’s money, too. And that’s always a good goal.
SL:
[unintelligible]
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�35
MH:
And so we get a huge sense of satisfaction, not of getting things named for us, but of
doing things that are important. The Spaceflight Academy over at the Museum was
something that we supported. Getting the Shuttle here was important. So our needs are
taken care of, and I guess I’d rather give it away than let the politicians take it later.
SL:
That’s a pretty darn good philosophy, I’d say. Yeah.
MH:
So that’s not probably on a popular theme with the politicians, but—
SL:
[laughs] That’s okay. Well, kind of one last question from me, anyway, is what would
you like people who view this—students, future researchers—what would you like them
to take away from this? What would you like to be remembered for?
MH:
Well, I guess—I don’t know that I want to be remembered for anything. [coughs]
SL:
Well, you don’t for your philanthropy, because your name might be associated, but not—
you don’t flash it around.
MH:
It might be. Well…
SL:
It’s there.
MH:
Yeah. But the point of it is, is we have built over the last now 60 years—I forget the exact
anniversary we’re on now, but it’s getting close to that, if not there already—a
tremendous institution. We’ve had great trustees, great leadership that have great insight,
and have really created a fantastic resource for the community. And it’s a place—no
matter what your interest, if you’re [unintelligible], you can go and find something to do.
If you’re a mother with a little kid, you’ve got—can find something to do. But we’ve got
stories to tell. We’ve got a place to educate people on both specific things but also the
value of education. And so I hope we’re leaving the world with an institution—and I say
“the world” in the broadest sense because I think we’re way beyond a local or regional
institution—with a resource that will continue to grow and mature
And that’s why strategic planning is important. We’re in a process of doing that now. I
led an effort in 2010 when I was CEO of a strategic planning process, Vision 2020. As a
result of my relationship with Bill Boeing, he made me a trustee of his charitable
foundation. And so we’re continuing to do that along with our own work and trying to
support organizations in the community that are doing similar things. Health and human
services, education, medical research, the universities. And so I just believe it’s important
that you give back to the community and make an investment in the community and that
we’re best able to do that in the Museum in a selected area. And I think we’re doing a
great job. I mean, that’s the difference between this institution and others. We have made
great progress, broadened our horizon, broadened our reach, expanded our reach, and
we’ll continue to do that in the future.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�36
SL:
Hm-hmm [affirmative]. No, that makes very good sense. I like that a lot. Any areas that
we haven’t covered that you’d like to talk about?
MH:
Well, you know, we’ve covered a lot. I mean, as I say, I’ve been very fortunate to have
the long-term relationship with the Museum that I have and from kind of humble
beginnings of just going to the trustee meetings. The Exhibit Committee was truly
transformational for me, as we talked about earlier, and really touched my hot button that
I’ve always had of history and reading. I think that we have been able to continue to
expand our ability to communicate and tell stories. And I’m sure there’s many, many
stories that we could go on with, but I’m not sure that the listener to this wants to hear all
those stories. But this has been a 30-year relationship—31-year now, I guess, relationship
with the Museum. It won’t continue forever, but it’s been extremely rewarding.
And I’ve been very lucky. As we talked about earlier, God knows that. Two great
industries, three great companies, a great institution here. We’ve had a great family
support, both Mary Kay and I. We’ve tried to support our own family. Don’t have one
pilot in the whole bunch. They’re more into horses.
SL:
That’s all right.
MH:
But when I look at my granddaughter wanting to be an elementary school teacher, that’s
where the reward is.
01:33:14
[Dealing with crises and tragedies]
SL:
Yeah. [unintelligible], it really is. Questions from either Kelci [Kelci Hopp, Oral History
Program Administrator], Peder [Peder Nelson, Digital Engagement Manager]? Anything
else that—
KELCI HOPP:
Steve, would you mind asking about some contemporary events? As in
[unintelligible] or maybe September 11th or…?
SL:
Oh, yeah. That’s something that we kind of talked about a little bit, Kelci and I, before.
You were on the Museum’s board when 9/11 happened, for instance, and when the—I
think when the earthquake that closed the runway and any impacts on that that you’d like
to talk about towards the Museum, towards you?
MH:
Well, I don’t have any specifics, other than the fact that I think the Museum generally has
been able to react extremely well to what I’ll call their own crises. The most recent one of
note was when we lost all the powerlines in front of the Museum, trapping people in the
Museum. We reacted well. We’re reacting quite well in dealing with the COVID crisis.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�37
I don’t recall specifically what was going on when 9/11 occurred. I mean, that whole day
was kind of a blur for a lot of people. Mary Kay and I were here watching it on
television. But again, you weave all those issues into your current activities. Some of
them you change policies and practice, some of it you put exhibits on, some of it you talk
about later. But those events occur. They’re going to continue to occur. We need to be
ready. I mean, look, we’re dealing in a different world today, and we’ve got to protect
our—the Museum, artifacts, library, and stuff, and protect our visitors and protect our
staff. And I’m really proud of what the Museum’s done during this COVID thing. I mean,
it’s been a tough two years now, going on three years, to deal with COVID. We’re open,
we’re closed. I mean—
SL:
Volunteers are here, volunteers are not [unintelligible]—
MH:
Yeah, yeah.
SL:
—and staff reductions.
MH:
So it’s kind of an amazing thing. And then the Museum is so dependent on volunteers. I
mean, I forget—I think we have like 500 of them. And we couldn’t run the place without
our volunteers. And to keep encouraging people to—whether it be restoration or docents
or doing administrative work. But we’ve got to take care of our own family, if you will,
and we need to keep pushing forward with our—what we think our mission is. Not “we
think.” We know our mission.
SL:
We know what the mission is. Yeah. [unintelligible].
MH:
And so I think we’re doing a great job. We have great leadership. We are so fortunate to
have an active board of trustees that bring a lot of expertise to it, are willing to get
involved, but get involved to the point of being advisors and cheerleaders, not trying to
run the place.
SL:
But not managers.
MH:
And that’s a very tricky line to walk with so many organizations. And we’ve managed to
do it for as long as I’ve been involved quite admirably. And I hope we continue to do
that.
01:36:46
[Thoughts on the Museum’s future]
SL:
Were you instrumental in bringing Matt back in, by any chance?
MH:
Well, yeah. Matt—I guess I technically hired Matt back in the—at the time. He came
right after I was there.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�38
SL:
Okay.
MH:
And I think I did the interview by telephone and brought him back in. And Matt’s both a
great friend and a great resource. I’ve gotten to know great people—I mean, trustees.
Gene McBrayer and Ed Renouard. I was on the Planning Committee with them as we
were trying to build these buildings. I was either—as the interim CEO when we were
doing the Space Gallery and so on and so forth. But those are two great resources. Bruce
McCaw. It’s kind of interesting to go visit Bruce’s little personal museum over in
Bellevue.
SL:
I bet it is.
MH:
And so it’s just amazing the people we’ve been able to attract from many, many walks of
life, many different skills. And each one of us brought something new. We got into the—
focusing on space for a while. We have the space medicine exhibit now. And so there’s
just so many avenues we can explore or the—and we have to manage—make sure our
appetite stays consistent with our ability to do things. But we should never stop growing
and figuring how to reach more people and tell more stories. And that’s the challenge
coming up now is we’re literally running out of space at Boeing Field to do things. And
so we’ve got some tough decisions ahead as to how do we continue the programmatic
stuff over a broader area, region and the state and whatnot, given the footprint that we
have.
The Museum’s a place where you don’t casually drive by and say, “I think I’ll go to the
Museum today.” You have to want to get there.
SL:
True.
MH:
And so it’s a disadvantage in that sense, that we’re not quite as accessible. But what we
have at Boeing Field is an active airport and a great facility now. But we’ve got to ask
ourselves some tough questions going into this strategic planning process is what do we
do next? Do we try to create a footprint somewhere else in the state? Do we try to do
something more at Paine Field? Do we go to Spokane or whatever? Do we start having
the affiliate program? There’s a lot of great, small museums in the area that are
interesting. I’m working with the Pacific Northwest Naval Museum in Oak Harbor,
whose only plane is an old PBY—
SL:
I’ve heard of that, yes.
MH:
—that we’re trying to get a building for. I’ve got a sentimental attachment to it because if
it weren’t for the PBY picking up my dad in the Solomon Sea, I wouldn’t be here at all.
But can we support other museums with that, either loaned articles—artifacts or
whatever? So there’s a lot of strategic directions we have to take. And fortunately, the
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�39
board is diverse in their thinking and supportive of those ideas, and that’s why this
upcoming long-range planning process is so important. [coughs] Excuse me.
SL:
It seems like that’s something that the Museum is pretty darn good at, from what I’ve
seen. I’ve only been at the Museum five years as a volunteer. And—
MH:
Well, you’ve got another 25 years to go to catch up with me.
SL:
At least, yes. [laughs] That’s if you were done now.
MH:
No, they do. We’ve had some great strategic planning processes. I headed up the one in
2010, the Vision 2020, and we got most of that stuff done. We’ve got to look at our
education facilities. Do we—there’s a whole set of things we ought to be thinking about.
Can we do something more with the Boeing archives out in Bellevue, where they’ve got
their history? Can we somehow use that? Can we use some of the other small aviation
museums around the state to create an affiliate program? I don’t know what we’re going
to do, but we now have a unique opportunity to plan what the Museum looks like. And
pick a year, 2035, what’s the headline you want to write then? And we did this exercise
at the last board meeting as to what’s the headline in 2035. And I think the one I wrote
was—is “The Museum Opens its Third Site in Spokane.” When you say it that way, it
means that you’ve already opened the second site somewhere.
SL:
Yeah. Someplace.
MH:
I’m not sure my fellow trustees agree with all that, but we’ve got to keep thinking that
way and exploring those ideas and testing them relative to the mission, the programs we
have, and obviously, the financial resources that are available to us.
01:42:09
[Aviation experiences]
SL:
[addressing a member of the crew] Oh, yeah. That’s a good point. [addressing Hallman]
Not an airplane guy, we know, but you’ve been around airplanes for a long time. You
obviously have an interest in them and a history. Do you have a favorite aircraft or
spacecraft or anything in the Museum that’s a favorite and why?
MH:
Well, I guess the favorite airplane is the Triple 7 [Boeing 777], partly because I was
somewhat involved with it and partly because—[coughs]—I spent quite a bit of time
flying back and forth to Japan in them. And it’s an amazing airplane.
I think the 787 is interesting because of the technology change that we see there. The use
of composites, the different ways we manage energy and electricity—electrical systems
on it. I don’t think the Museum’s going to get a B-25 anytime in the future, but I can go
look at the ones up at the other museums up in Everett. But we continue to fill in the
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�40
blanks on what roles did aviation play, not only in the military, but in the civilian stuff.
And it’s the diversity of things that we acquire then that I think are—that are important.
So I don’t have a favorite, per se. I just—I periodically—one of the nice things about
being CEO is when the place closes and the people leave, you can sort of wander around
at your leisure. And you’ve seen them all before, but then you can examine more closely.
And then once in a while, the guard will come up and want to shoo you out. But that was
one of the advantages I had, to have time to look at it. I think we need to tell the stories in
better ways, more expansive ways, so that depending on what the interest of the visitor is,
they can either go into depth on something. And I think there’s a lot of technology that
will allow us to do that.
But if I had to pick an airplane, it would be the 777, I think. That’s the only one that I had
any—and it was very—“involvement’s” a strong word because I wasn’t [unintelligible]
involved. I had an opportunity over the three and a half years with Boeing Company to be
an observer of my people doing it. I never take credit for it.
SL:
What was the first airplane you rode on? Do you remember?
MH:
Oh, I do remember. I was in high school in Pennsylvania. The assistant football coach
was in the Navy Reserve and got to take the team, if you will, on a—I think it was a DC8. It was one of the prop planes, obviously. I can’t remember what it was. DC-4—
SL:
DC-7—
MH:
DC—smaller. That was the first time. And it was a Navy plane, so we were sitting in
fairly uncomfortable seats facing the aisle, facing the center of the airplane.
SL:
That was probably a DC-4.
MH:
DC-4.
SL:
Probably was.
MH:
But that was the first time and it really went up. And I always enjoyed the Collings
Foundations’ visits because I got to fly in a B-25 and a B-17 and a B-24. And I continue
to marvel at our aviators in World War II. I mean, these people were in airplanes where if
you push the skin, they actually went in—
SL:
Yeah. Oil cans. [laughs]
MH:
And they had these little panels that sort of were like armor plate, but they really weren’t,
to protect certain parts of the airplane. And I know when you’re taking off in those flights
on the B-17 is is don’t grab any wires because some of them are connected to the control
surfaces and the pilot’s controls, and you’ll be flying the airplane, not the pilot. And so
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�41
the opportunity to experience in a very tiny way what my father, my father-in-law went
through. My father’s fairly tall. He was 6’2’’. And to get to the nose of a B-25, you have
to crawl through a tunnel that goes under the pilot’s seat. And so he obviously did it, but
it’s kind of an interesting journey. And it’s that tunnel that was there that allowed them to
put the 75 millimeter cannon in because that’s where it went.
SL:
Oh, that’s where it went.
MH:
The loader sat—I mean, this thing was huge. The loader sat behind the pilot and handloaded individual rounds in the thing. So to get those experiences to me was just
absolutely fascinating. It was getting history in a much more real way than reading about
it.
SL:
Yeah. Yeah.
MH:
And that’s the kind of stuff I like.
01:47:36
[Concluding remarks]
SL:
Yeah. Did you build models when you were a kid?
MH:
Oh, yeah. Gosh, we did. Some flying, some static. My dad was a Scout leader, and we
always had to have the biggest plane or—I remember building kites one time, and he was
determined—then we had a contest. Who could get their kite up the highest? My gosh,
we had the biggest kite, and I swear we had a quarter-inch rope on it to keep it attached.
But, boy, we were going to get that puppy up.
SL:
[laughs] Did you?
MH:
Oh, yeah.
SL:
Yeah.
MH:
Yeah.
SL:
Oh, that’s fun.
MH:
But those were the fun experiences you had with that. I remember we took the—
[laughs]—were living in Aiken, South Carolina at the time, and we went up to Columbia
to a University of South Carolina football game. It was Scouting Day. So if you can
imagine a stadium that’s got like 20,000 Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts in it. And we had
driven up in cars, and we got ready to leave, and they were doing a head count. My dad
was doing a head count. And we ended up with one extra person, who started to cry.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�42
Well, trying to find their Scoutmaster when everybody looked the same—they’re all
dressed in Scouting uniforms—it was kind of an interesting challenge.
But those were the kind of fun things you did with your parents. And I was very fortunate
to have very involved parents. I tried to be involved with our girls and granddaughters.
And that’s my reward in doing all this stuff, is making sure they’ve got every
opportunity. Maybe I’m more sensitive because we’ve got granddaughters and daughters,
to make sure that they can be independent and have access to the things that—they can do
what they want to do without not having to do it because they need the pay. And that’s
why I’m particularly proud of my granddaughter wanting to be a teacher.
SL:
That makes very good sense to me. And you’ve obviously been involved and have been
able to provide some wonderful opportunities for them. And they were willing and smart
enough to take you up on those.
MH:
Well, they—I’m not sure they were willing all the time. They were still—they’re still
teenagers. [laughs]
SL:
[laughs] Yeah. [unintelligible].
MH:
And that’s fine. I want them to be independent. That’s always interesting to see the
phases you go through.
SL:
Yeah. I have daughters as well, and they’re in their mid-30s and—yeah.
MH:
Well, then you can—you know exactly what I’m talking about.
SL:
I can relate. Yes. Okay. Well, with that, are there any other questions from here? If not,
I’d like to say thank you so very, very much. I really appreciate it.
MH:
Good. No, I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve sort of avoided this for some time. I didn’t really
necessarily think my stories were particularly interesting.
SL:
They are interesting. They really are. Everybody has a story. Yours are interesting, a lot
in how they relate to the Museum. And personally, thank you for everything that you’ve
done for the Museum. This oral history program in particular for me has been wonderful.
I learn so much from the people I get a chance to talk to.
MH:
Good.
SL:
I appreciate it.
MH:
Well, I’m happy to do it. And I guess I will continue along with the Museum as long as I
can.
SL:
Excellent. Thank you.
2021 © The Museum of Flight
�43
01:51:06
[END OF INTERVIEW]
2021 © 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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
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
Hallman, Michael R., 1945-
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Little, Steve
Biographical Text
<p>Mike Hallman worked in Sales and Marketing with IBM, as the Boeing Company’s Chief Information Officer and then Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, and is a longtime trustee of the Museum of Flight.</p>
<p>Michael Robert Hallman was born in San Bernardino, California on June 6, 1945, to Frank and Virginia Hallman. He was the oldest of three children. His father flew B-25s in the Pacific theater during World War II, returning home in 1944 and then serving as a bombing and navigation instructor at George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. Hallman grew up around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and spent his high school years in suburban Chicago, Illinois. He then earned his bachelor’s in business administration in 1966 and MBA in 1967, both from the University of Michigan. While in school he worked summers for the Greyhound Bus Company escorting tours to New York City. He also made a few trips to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he met Mary Kay Johnson, whom he married in 1967.</p>
<p>After graduation Hallman joined International Business Machines (IBM) in the sales and marketing area. He started out in Chicago in 1968. Over his 20-year career at IBM he held several different positions, remaining primarily sales and marketing. He moved among several IBM locations in addition to Chicago including Detroit, Michigan; White Plains, New York; St. Louis, Missouri; and Atlanta, Georgia. By the end of his tenure with IBM he was Vice President of Field Operations with responsibility for half of the country’s sales and service support.</p>
<p>Recruited by Boeing Computer Services (BCS) in 1987, Hallman ran their computer operations for services provided to non-Boeing companies. These included the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, NASA Ground Communications, and the New York Police Department. Hallman was promoted to President of BCS just as Boeing was embarking on the 777 program, which was their first airplane designed entirely with computers. In his time at BCS, Hallman managed the transition from slide rules and drafting tables to the CATIA computer system.</p>
<p>In 1990 Microsoft recruited Hallman to become their President. Joining the company when they were early in the development of personal computers, he managed the company to $1 billion in sales while streamlining operations.</p>
<p>At about this same time Hallman joined the Museum of Flight’s Board of Trustees. In the more than three decades he has served with the Board, he has served as the Museum’s Chairman, Vice Chairman, and as the interim President and CEO during a time of transition. He has chaired the Exhibits Committee, the Communications and Marketing Committee, the Compensation Committee, several gala committees, and has served on virtually every standing committee of the board.</p>
<p>While serving as a Trustee, Hallman’s primary focus has centered on enhancing the Museum’s educational mission. With a vision to record and preserve important stories of people who worked, lived, and shaped aviation, he and his wife created the Mary Kay and Michael Hallman Oral History Program. He also helped establish the Michael and Mary Kay Hallman Spaceflight Academy exhibit. In 2020 Hallman was the fourth recipient of the Red Barn Heritage Award in recognition of his significant and exceptional commitment to The Museum of Flight. His relationship with the late William E. Boeing, Jr. and their mutual admiration for one another lead to his appointment as the only trustee representative of the Aldarra Foundation, the Boeing family’s foundation.</p>
<p>As of 2022, Hallman continues to live in the Seattle area and maintains his involvement with the Museum of Flight.</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/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Michael R. Hallman oral history interview
Description
An account of the resource
Born-digital video recording of an oral history with Michael R. Hallman and interviewer Steve Little, recorded as part of The Museum of Flight Oral History Program, October 25, 2021.
Abstract
A summary of the resource.
<p>Museum of Flight trustee Michael R. “Mike” Hallman is interviewed about his life and experiences in the computer, aviation, and nonprofit fields. He discusses his career with International Business Machines (IBM) during the 1960s through the late 1980s and his subsequent careers with Boeing Computer Services and Microsoft. He also discusses his involvement with The Museum of Flight as a trustee, interim CEO, and (along with his wife, Mary Kay) co-founder of the Museum’s Oral History Program.</p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Introduction and personal background -- Father’s military service during World War II -- Family and educational background -- Career with IBM -- Career with Boeing and Microsoft -- Interest in aviation and education and involvement with The Museum of Flight -- Experiences as Museum’s interim CEO -- Story about Captain Joe Kimm and interest in oral histories -- Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park -- Relationship with Bill Boeing Jr. -- Philanthropy and legacy -- Dealing with crises and tragedies -- Thoughts on the Museum’s future -- Aviation experiences -- Concluding remarks
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2021-10-25
Subject
The topic of the resource
Boeing Computer Services
Boeing Model 777 Family
Boeing, Bill, Jr., 1922-2015
Hallman, David, 1948-
Hallman, Frank M., 1921-1996
Hallman, Mary Kay
Hallman, Michael R., 1945-
International Business Machines Corporation
Kimm, Joseph Edward
Museum of Flight (Seattle, Wash.)
Vietnam War, 1961-1975
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
United States
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Museum of Flight (Seattle, Wash.)
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
1 recording (1 hr., 51 min., 6 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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
OH_Hallman_Michael
OH_Hallman_Michael_transcription