Chapter 13
The National Airlines Strike of 1948
November 1979. The penthouse suite atop the Americana Hotel on
Jack Pitts, an energetic, fast-talking man whose coal-black hair belies his 64 years, moves rapidly around the room, slapping backs, laughing. This is his show. Having put it all together, he’s anxious for the “NAL Buccaneers” to have a good time and worried that they won’t.
“There will still be some bitterness tonight,” Pitts had explained earlier in the day. “I came to work in 1951 after the strike, so I feel no personal animosity toward any of the scabs. I figured they had as much right as anybody else who retired from NAL [National Airlines] to join our group when I drew up the charter. But, boy, you’d better believe there are some guys who disagree. I can understand why they do, and I’m not trying to justify what the scabs did either. Anytime you take a bunch of guys doing a good job and put them out for nine months—and all the hassle they went through with the physicals and check rides—there’s sure to be bitterness. These guys will never kiss and make up.”
Jack Pitts’s anxiety is heightened by one of those classic blunders that just couldn’t happen, but did. As the prime organizer of both the NAL retired group and the Retired Airline Pilots Association (RAPA), the umbrella organization comprising retired pilot groups, Pitts is an activist accustomed to keeping tabs on several projects at once. This time, however, one little detail has gotten away from him.
While walking through the
lobby of the
Thunderstruck, he hurried to find the hotel manager to insist the banners be changed to “Welcome NAL Buccaneers.” But because it was late in the day and the banners had been prepared weeks in advance, the hotel’s harried manager could do nothing about the mistake.
Jack Pitts had no alternative but to brazen it out, hoping no one would get too upset with the banners welcoming the “National Pilots Association,” a name full of painful memories for ALPA loyalists. He was certain they’d notice, and he was right.
“Look at that!” snorts Sid Wilson, trim and elegantly dressed, as he pauses outside the main ballroom to stare at the banner. “National Pilots Association! Can you believe it? That’s what the scabs called themselves in 1948!”
“You ought to hear what we called them!” exclaims Earl Marx, at 83 one of NAE’s oldest retirees.
Bruce Wilson (no relation to Sid) and Ed Brown laugh with Earl Marx, whom they call the “Owl Man” because he always bid night flights. Bruce Wilson, whose horn-rimmed glasses give him a professorial air, gestures to the sign, saying, “We really don’t attach much importance to the fact that scabs are eligible for the Buccaneers. But let them get into ALPA, get the ALPA benefits, just by paying a fine and back dues? No way!”
“ALPA wouldn’t permit it,” says Ed Brown. “Some of them tried several times—one even offered to pay $5,000 to get into ALPA.”
“You forgive, but you never forget,” adds Bruce Wilson. “Certainly time is a great healer of everything, but our gut feelings about scabs will always be there. They tried to ruin this profession.”
“Some guys won’t join because
the scabs are allowed,” says Ed McDonald.
“Right,” agrees Sid Wilson. “Bobby Rohan says he won’t, and he’s been the heart and soul of ALPA on National ever since Charley Ruby left.”
“You notice who’s not here?” asks Ed McDonald.
“Charley Ruby,” several voices answer at once. The knot of talking men is conspicuous because of its ALPA lapel emblems.
Throughout the remainder of the evening, at the banquet and at the cocktail party that follows, the stories flow. But always there is a certain tension, slight but palpable. No one in the room who walked a picket line in 1948 will ever be more than merely polite to the tiny contingent of scabs braving the obvious displeasure of those whose jobs they took in 1948. Such are the wages of strikebreaking.
The NAL strike of 1948 was like World War II—a good fight, a just cause, an evil foe. George T. “Ted” Baker, founder of NAL and its president during the strike, played Hitler to Behncke’s Winston Churchill.
“If Ted Baker were here tonight,” Sid Wilson says, “he’d walk in this room, charm the socks off everybody here, if he wanted to, buy drinks, waltz the ladies, you’d think he was the greatest guy in the world. He’d have everybody eating out of his hand. Tomorrow, he wouldn’t know you, cut your throat in a second.”
“Once I bought 150 gallons of gas on my own Texaco credit card,”
says Ed McDonald. “I was flying copilot for Herschel Clark. We were on the
ground at
“Ted Baker got religion once, right after the strike,” Bruce
Wilson remarks. “I was on a layover in
“Boy, was that ever a waste of money,” interjects Earl Marx.
“Anyway, there must have been a dozen company executives who came around and said, ‘Well, Bruce, you’re going to get your full salary,’ and during that party Baker even autographed my cast.”
“Well, maybe a month had gone by after I got back to flying the line when one day my phone rang and it was Mr. Baker. ‘Bruce, I was wondering how you wanted to pay back your loan?’ And I said, ‘What loan, Mr. Baker?’ He said, ‘Why, that money I loaned you while you were off.’ I said, ‘For crying out loud, Mr. Baker, I never asked you for a loan while I was off!’ He said, ‘Oh yes, that money was just a loan. I thought you understood that.’
“So I argued with him, trying not to get him irritated, because he was easy to irritate. I said, ‘Mr. Baker, would you do me a favor and just think about this—think about the fact that it wasn’t a loan, that you agreed to pay me?’ I was hoping he might be in a good mood and change his mind. And Baker said, ‘Bruce, I am not going to change my mind. I thought this all over before I ever paid you the money in the first place. Besides, Bruce, with the money you’re making, you will never miss it.’ He took every penny of it out of my salary.”
Everyone has a story to tell about incidents on the picket line, about harassment from local southern police departments unfriendly to “communistic” labor unions. It took guts to walk a picket line in the South in the late 1940s, and NAL’s routes were predominantly southern.
“Palmer Holmes rented two
apartments in
“To make a long story short, somebody had murdered a prostitute and dumped her body in the back of Bruen’s car parked out there on the street. Everyone was innocent, but of course the police didn’t know that, and anyway they were looking for an excuse to get us off the picket lines. But that kind of thing will throw a scare into you.”
As Charley Ruby can testify,
the longer the strike went on, the greater was the possibility of real violence.
“We had only 126 pilots available for picketing,” Ruby remembers during an
interview at his home in
The first thing any student of the 1948 NAL strike has to
understand is that the reason for the strike wasn’t
really what it seemed. Ostensibly, the strike was over the arbitrary
dismissal of a pilot named Maston G. O’Neal, who damaged one of Baker’s
Lodestars during a landing at
The accident happened at 3:13 a.m. on Friday the 13th, and what was about to happen to 28-year-old Maston O’Neal would be enough to make anybody superstitious. Within a month, two more NAL Lodestars crashed, and although both pilots were guiltier of error than O’Neal had been, the fact that he was first roused Baker’s ire.
Old-timers on NAL offered a more gossipy explanation for O’Neal’s
firing. “Maston was movie-star handsome, a former football player at the
Those who knew Ted Baker even slightly admit that he was a freewheeler in an era when that kind of behavior was uncommon. Indeed, the name of the NAL retired group, the “Buccaneers,” stems directly from Baker’s philosophy and reputation—wine, women, and song, except that NAL always came first.
“He was a skirt chaser, a notorious womanizer,” Charley Ruby agrees, with more than a hint of contempt.
Did Maston O’Neal get fired because he beat Baker’s time with a
woman? “Hell, no!” says Maston O’Neal heatedly. “There’s absolutely nothing to
that.” A self-made millionaire, O’Neal lives in
I was dating a girl, a secretary to one of Baker’s buddies. There was nothing wrong with it—I was single and so was she. Now, it later turned out that this friend of Baker’s was sweet on her, but I didn’t know it at the time. The stories that I was romancing his wife, who was a wonderful, lovely lady, are just crazy gossip.
The
day after the crash at
And
I’m gonna tell you something else: that strike wasn’t over Maston O’Neal. Boy,
it really burns me up when some guy comes up and says, “So you’re the one they
went out on strike for in 1948.” ALPA didn’t go out on strike because of me.
They went out because Ted Baker treated the pilots
like dogs! But you can’t strike
because somebody abuses the hell out of you, you’ve got to have a legal reason.
My firing was the only legal reason ALPA had for a strike. Little pebbles, if you pile them
up long enough, make big fences, and there was one hell of a big fence between
Baker and the pilots. It’s like Dan Carmel, the ALPA lawyer, said to me during
the presidential emergency board hearings up in
Dan
Carmel was a brilliant guy. I lived up in
Maston O’Neal is right. Behncke’s first public statement on the strike cited “increasing apprehension on the part of pilots about flying planes whose safety aspects from the standpoint of maintenance are open to serious doubts.” Baker promptly slapped Behncke with a $5 million slander suit, claiming that ALPA’s use of safety as an issue was a “smokescreen.”
A mechanics’ strike had triggered the safety issue. NAL pilots hated crossing their picket lines. The pilots also feared that the airplanes were unsafe, and they were more than a little anxious about some hotheaded striking mechanic sabotaging a plane. In addition, ALPA was under pressure, having a terribly difficult time with the four-engine issue, and there was evidence that the Air Transport Association (ATA) was encouraging Ted Baker to be as obstinate as possible to provoke a strike. If ALPA could be broken by a lost strike on NAL, it could be broken elsewhere by similar means. If high management was ever going to rid itself of ALPA, now was the time.
NAL was the seventeenth airline to sign an employment agreement
with ALPA. On Dec. 9, 1941, two days after
By June 1942, under the cover of wartime emergency, Baker began paying his pilots a lump sum monthly in an unorthodox arrangement that clearly violated the contract. He at first appeared indifferent to Behncke’s threat of legal action, but later modified his attitude when Behncke made it clear that he was not bluffing. In addition, on April 26, 1942, CAB announced an investigation of NAL’s pay policies and implied that Baker stood in jeopardy of losing his certificate. Baker announced publicly that he had had “a change of heart.” It would not be the last time that he feigned a conversion.
Behncke told the meeting of ALPA’s Central Executive Council (CEC), on Jan. 22, 1942, that Ted Baker was “a tough one” who was unscrupulous enough to “take advantage of the President’s proclamation against wartime strikes.” In a typical maneuver, Baker had laid off a copilot named R. D. Fordyce, who had only one day remaining in his probationary copilot period, and then offered to rehire him as a new copilot. Baker once declared that copilots should pay him for flying. “He did this simply to materially reduce the copilot’s pay scale,” Behncke said. The CEC voted Fordyce a salary of $105 a month while ALPA appealed his case to the NMB. “Baker is an SOB, everybody hates him, including the neutral assigned by the NMB,” Behncke said. As a warning to Baker that ALPA would no longer put up with his petty “contract chiseling,” the CEC authorized a strike vote by NAL’s pilots—a very unusual step in wartime. Baker pulled in his horns at this point, and things quieted down for a while.
In 1944, trouble again erupted on NAL when Baker hired a group of
ex-Pan American Air Ferries pilots and slotted them as captains. Some NAL
copilots were eligible for promotion to captain, but Baker ignored the seniority
rule spelled out in the contract, contemptuously daring Behncke to take him
before the NMB again. Behncke traveled to
By the time Maston O’Neal ground-looped his Lodestar at
I started with National in 1939 after working with the Skywriting
Corporation of
I wound up in the hot seat in 1940. We fought so hard, Charley
Ruby and I, we fought it out with Baker and won. I’m from a union background,
the coalfields of
After that, it seemed like Mr. Baker never forgave us for threatening to walk out and ground his airline. He was so antipilot; something in his personality made him hire executives who were hard on pilots. You couldn’t be granted any kind of favor; seniority meant nothing. We had some real rough times. Baker wanted a pilot pool, wanted to assign people to trips, and it took us an awful long time to get bidding.
The strike in 1948 was just like walking into a sand trap and not knowing it was there. We’d taken so much heckling from Baker, and ALPA wasn’t strong enough then to do anything about it. We had such a few men fighting for such a great cause. We were building a house to live in. We were fighting for ALPA’s future. If we’d lost in 1948, there wouldn’t be an ALPA today.
At the last minute, just before the NAL pilots were scheduled to walk out on Feb. 3, 1948, Baker might have offered to rehire O’Neal. O’Neal claims that an eleventh-hour deal was worked out to rehire him, but that it fell through because nobody at the temporary strike headquarters in the Everglades Hotel would talk to either Kershaw or Baker. Despite his subsequent financial success, Maston O’Neal remains a bitter man, angrier at Charley Ruby today than at the late Ted Baker, who fired him so long ago.
“You’ve got to remember,” he says with some heat, “that I was 31 years old, I was broke. I had nothing going for me, and I had gone through this hell for three years. All I wanted was my job back. ALPA wanted that strike, wanted to teach Baker a lesson. That’s the truth.”
Perhaps. But it is also true that ALPA had come to O’Neal’s aid in 1945, three years earlier, when Baker had said, “I have no doubt that Maston O’Neal can go through a pilot checkout course and be approved to fly on my airline again. But I am not going to reemploy him as a pilot because he lacks judgment. I have offered him other nonflying employment with NAL.”
Baker made the statement on Sept. 17, 1945, right on schedule, just as O’Neal’s company-imposed two-week grounding ended. The ALPA loyalists had been through a lot with Baker; they had watched him maneuver, lie, cheat, and steal. Charley Ruby, who was at NAL’s creation in 1934, probably knew Ted Baker better than anyone. He’d heard Baker make similar deathbed statements and so thought it better to walk out, get a firm commitment to rehire O’Neal, and then cancel the strike. Dave Behncke agreed that a short walkout might have a therapeutic effect on Baker, but the decision to strike was entirely a local one.
What followed was the longest and costliest pilot strike in ALPA’s history up to that point. Most of the NAL pilots thought the strike would be short. The winter tourist season, traditionally NAL’s most profitable time, was in full swing. The NAL pilots thought they had Baker at such a disadvantage that he would have to submit to save his airline from catastrophic loss. Charley Ruby knew better:
You ask if I knew that Baker would try to break the strike. I will tell you flatly, yes, I knew. I knew the man, and I knew the only way he would not try to break us was if he couldn’t get pilots. When he began to get people to fly, I knew there was going to be trouble. I didn’t say anything to my own crowd for the simple reason that it would have created a panic. We might have held Baker if some of our guys hadn’t jumped the fence. When the first three decided to strikebreak, Baker knew he could use them as a nucleus to train other crews. What hurt was that one of the guys who scabbed on us was Fordyce, and he had a job only because of ALPA. Fordyce repaid us by scabbing.
Baker sent telegrams to the strikers informing them that they were fired. Then he began advertising far and wide for pilots. Through the Military Pilots Association and other contacts, Baker began signing on pilots to break the strike. The first 77 strikebreakers hired averaged 34 years old, with several listing 5,000 hours of pilot time and claiming recent time in the DC-4. (The backbone of NAL’s fleet was still the old Lockheed Lodestar, but Baker had four new DC-6s ready for operation.) By March 1945, he was operating a token schedule of 14 flights daily. Passenger traffic was light, and he was obviously losing money. So he appealed to the CAB for financial aid in the form of increased mail subsidies, which was his right.
The unwritten story of the NAL strike of 1948, as it would be of the Southern Airways strike of 1960, was the role that friendly bureaucrats played in sustaining the two companies. The federal government, in effect, underwrote the costs of the strikes by bailing out both Baker and Frank Hulse, head of Southern Airways, after the strikes induced by their own mismanagement brought their companies to the verge of bankruptcy. These bureaucrats were beyond the immediate power of the political process and were traditionally more at home with management than labor. In the long history of federal bureaucrats moving from a supervisory role in government to a high-salaried job in the industry that they formerly regulated, none is more blatant than the case of Edward P. Warner, the noted MIT professor who served on CAB until 1945. As a CAB member, his rulings invariably went against the pilots. In October 1945, Warner quit his $10,000-per-year government job to accept a $22,000-per-year appointment with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), largely upon the recommendation of the airline industry.
Robert J. “Bobby” Knox, who retired as a 747 captain in 1975, believes CAB was instrumental in helping Baker get his airline back in the air:
As soon as Baker found out he could get a few crews qualified, he lowered the boom. The CAB started helping him every way they could. I remember we didn’t get those telegrams right away, and these three people, Fordyce, Wedge, and Royall, were just scared to death. I talked with those guys, trying to impress upon them the importance of staying together, that they were going to hurt their reputations around the country by being scabs. After that, the feeling got so heated that you didn’t talk. I mean, if somebody saw you talking to one of those guys, they’d think you were a traitor.
Knox was well known as a banner-towing pilot. Mac Gilmour would write in smoke “DON’T FLY NATIONAL,” while Knox towed a banner reading “NAL PILOTS ON STRIKE,” timing their flights to coincide with NAL’s. The Century pilots back in 1932 had done something similar by painting “CENTURY IS UNFAIR TO PILOTS” on the side of an aircraft. They used this aircraft to fly formation with E. L. Cord’s Stinson Trimotors. By 1948, of course, such a tactic would have invited retaliation from CAB, so the smoke writing and banner towing were more appropriate.
By March 1948, the ALPA
loyalists on NAL knew they were in for a long struggle. Some pilots left the
battle to go back into the military; others wouldn’t help with the picketing.
ALPA paid the strikers as much as $500 per month, so there was no extreme
financial hardship. But there was a considerable psychic hardship, particularly
as the strike dragged on without resolution.
In May 1948, ALPA secured an overwhelming majority vote from the pilots of all airlines to respect the NAL pickets wherever they appeared. This would have crippled the industry to such an extent that Baker would have been forced to settle. ATA secured a court injunction against this tactic, however, and on May 10, ALPA lost another round when CAB approved increased mail payments to NAL. The bureaucrats were obviously going to subsidize the strikebreakers.
Dave Behncke became involved
in the NAL strike only after it was in progress. Behncke, as we have seen, had a
multitude of troubles in 1948, and the last thing he wanted was a distraction on
a carrier like NAL. But the fight with Baker was well tailored to his strengths,
for it ultimately involved an appeal to politics, something Behncke was adept
at. After Baker completely replaced his ALPA crews, Behncke had but one recourse
left—to take his case to
The exact pattern of Behncke’s
influence with the Truman administration is impossible to reconstruct because
it was exercised indirectly, through the American Federation of Labor’s
political arm. Behncke moved adroitly to ally ALPA with the labor movement that
was the key to Truman’s faint hope of victory in 1948, and he did this when most
airline pilots probably were becoming more conservative because of their
economic status. Behncke courted Truman assiduously in the pages of
The Air Line Pilot, repeatedly running stories favorable to his
administration, candidacy, policies, and even his family.
Shortly after CAB agreed to subsidize Baker’s strikebreaking by increasing his mail subsidy, Truman appointed an emergency fact-finding board, as called for under the provisions of the Railway Labor Act. On July 19, 1948, the emergency board reached its verdict. “What ALPA sought was reasonable,” the board declared. “It did not seek the reinstatement of O’Neal, but only an impartial determination of the propriety of his discharge. Such a determination has not been made to this day. Failure to afford it caused the strike, and the responsibility rests with the carrier.” The board also criticized Ted Baker’s “juvenile” attitude in the matter, but that was as far as it could go. Its function was merely to offer a proposal to end the dispute, and it had no power to force either party to accept the proposal. The emergency board’s suggestion of arbitration was the only reasonable one, but Ted Baker was having none of it.
The sad fact about the 1948 strike on NAL was that it lasted much
longer than necessary because it coincided with a presidential election. If
Dewey were to win, Baker would win—it was that simple. Dave Behncke was a
long-time Democratic loyalist, but he was open-minded enough to support
Republicans who voted right on ALPA’s issues. In 1948, Behncke knew that a
Democratic victory was ALPA’s best hope. The Republican Congress of 1946–48,
Truman’s hated “do-nothing Eightieth Congress” did more than nothing on the
labor front. It passed the Taft-Hartley Act, with its “right-to-work” clause,
severely damaging the labor movement. Consequently, labor leaders were
unanimous in their endorsement of Truman. Although nobody gave Truman much of a
chance, he somehow managed to pull the greatest political upset in American
history. The little man from
The immediate object of Baker’s concern after Dewey unexpectedly lost to Truman was CAB’s dismemberment hearing, which would have revoked NAI’s operating certificate and awarded its routes to Pan American, Delta, and Eastern. Behncke had no interest in destroying NAL, for that would have made the ALPA loyalists’ job loss permanent. But he made certain that ALPA pressed its political advantage fully so that Baker would realize that he must either abandon the luckless scabs to fate or lose his airline.
“Patriotism,” Samuel Johnson once said, “is the last refuge of a
scoundrel.” In Baker’s case, religion was. In as curious an episode as ever
happened in the history of aviation labor relations, Baker suddenly announced
that, owing to a deep religious conversion that had put Christian love in his
heart and forgiveness in his soul, he now wished to settle. He became a devoted
admirer of Dr. Frank Buchman’s Moral Re-Armament, a religious movement then much
in vogue among corporate executives. Immediately after the presidential
election, when Baker realized that he had backed the wrong horse, he departed
for Buchman’s Moral Re-Armament headquarters on
Not more than two days after the election I remember I was
walking a picket in downtown
Ed McDonald sounds somewhat cynical about the genuineness of Baker’s religiosity. As we shall see in the next chapter, there was good reason for his skepticism. “Baker was the kind of guy who would drive a hundred miles out of his way to get even,” Maston O’Neal remembers. As the unhappy aftermath of the NAL strike would show, Baker was capable of driving farther than that.
On Nov. 24, 1948, an agreement signed in
For Maston O’Neal, the outcome proved to be but one more disappointment in a long series of disappointments. The arbitrator, or “neutral,” assigned to his case found against him down the line.
Another part of the settlement required each side to drop all
pending litigation. Baker had sued Behncke for slander, seeking $5 million in
damages after Behncke had said that NAL’s planes were unsafe. Behncke had, in
turn, countersued for $1 million, alleging that NAL’s “willful attempt to break
a lawful union contract” caused ALPA financial loss. As much as ALPA spent on
the NAL strike, Baker had spent far more, reporting an operating loss of nearly
$3 million for the 9-month, 21-day strike. James M. Landis, former chairman of
CAB and future dean of the
Despite Ted Baker’s “sweet talk,” as Sid Wilson puts it, which included an offer to let every striker buy 100 shares of NAL stock at a huge discount, there remained a suspicion that his new attitude was premised more on necessity than on conviction. Behncke had forced upon Baker a settlement that Baker hated and would shortly try to subvert.
As for Dave Behncke, the year 1948 marked his last political
hurrah. He had cultivated politicians and fellow labor leaders for years. The
NAL strike was the ultimate test of Behncke’s ability to have the larger labor
union movement serve ALPA’s interests. Without the American Federation of Labor
and the careful efforts of Dave Behncke to exert the power of the national labor
movement in
In January 1949, Mr. and Mrs. David L. Behncke were official
guests of President Truman at his inauguration. They stayed in
It was Dave Behncke’s moment.