Chapter 15
The Fall of Dave Behncke
Some kinds of history are
easier to write than others. A history based on oral sources, such as this one,
comprises not only memories gone astray, but also the highs and lows in the
lives of its notables. Happiness, the flush of victory, and calm satisfaction
are emotions that are fine to remember and wonderful for setting the fires of
enthusiasm dancing in the eyes of those who have seen their share of seasons.
These emotions are also fine for a historian—good vibrations resonate easily
across long gaps of time, and it’s easy to feel them and to share the good old
times with those who remember them so well.
But what about the bad times? They are as much a part of the story as the good ones, but they don’t rekindle the friendly fires of yesteryear. Rather, they bring pain and pursed lips, sudden awkward silences, wrinkled brows, and even deliberate evasions, the kind designed to stifle memory and to bury things that, hard enough to live through, are no easier to remember.
Such a time was the ouster of Dave Behncke from the presidency of ALPA. Not once, in all the interviews that make up this history, have those who participated in the ouster expressed any sentiment other than sorrow. There was no joy in it for anybody, no flush of victory, no satisfaction. A generation later, people still remember the ordeal of Dave Behncke with only one emotion—deep, abiding pain.
The pilots who removed Behncke from office liked the “Old Man,” deeply respected him for what he had done, and hoped against hope that he would see that his time had passed and that he must make way for a new day. They all agreed that, by trying to hang on, Dave Behncke was destroying not only ALPA but himself as well.
But Dave Behncke didn’t know how to do anything but fight, he had been fighting all his life, and he couldn’t stop.
By 1950, ALPA was entering a new era of high technology and rapid change. The Association claimed approximately 6,000 dues-paying members, and was at the apex of an industry that was growing faster than anybody would have believed possible just a few years earlier. So far as inter-city passenger transportation was concerned, the handwriting was already on the wall—the railroads must inevitably give way to aviation. That meant that ALPA affairs would no longer concern only elite travelers, but everybody.
The new world of commercial aviation was a big one, and Dave Behncke was increasingly lost in it. His worst failing in these years was an utter inability to delegate authority. The 1944 convention had authorized a full professional structure for ALPA, consisting of 11 departments. Among the 44 people employed full-time by ALPA, a fair number were professionals, like Ted Linnert of Engineering and Air Safety, who should have been allowed to manage as they saw fit. But Behncke had to have a hand in everything that went on in every department, usually even minute details.
Even worse was Behncke’s
habit of becoming fixated on particular problems. For example, the early
troubles of the Martin 202 caused Behncke to devote far too much time to
engineering problems. He habitually ordered other ALPA staffers to “drop
everything” to help when a critical problem arose. Although that might have been
justified occasionally, Behncke did it constantly.
“He would call me at all hours of the night,” Ted Linnert says,
“particularly after a crash. He was very much affected by the
As we have seen, a measure of
dissatisfaction with Behncke’s leadership was already manifest by 1947, when
Willis H. Proctor of American Airlines (AAL) challenged Behncke during the
convention. Proctor’s bid for the presidency was the first serious challenge to
Behncke since the early days, when a number of pilots favored Frank Ormsbee for
the permanent presidency of ALPA. Ormsbee almost single-handedly organized Pan
American World Airways (PAA) pilots in 1931 and got fired for his trouble.
Behncke subsequently hired Ormsbee to be ALPA’s
In 1934, Behncke fired Ormsbee on trumped-up charges of “conduct unbecoming a member” (although Ormsbee was not technically a member of ALPA, since he no longer worked for PAA). Behncke’s jealousy of Ormsbee and his fear that Ormsbee might be a competitor for the leadership of ALPA led him to the first major display of the kind of vindictiveness that would later become more evident, and it left many early airline pilots feeling uneasy about Behncke’s mental balance. They knew perfectly well that Ormsbee had been guilty of nothing more than doing an excellent job and that this excellence had inspired Behncke’s jealousy.
Given Behncke’s nearly hysterical reaction to the Ormsbee affair, Willis Proctor’s challenge in 1947 was pure déjà-vu, even to Behncke’s preferring charges against him for “conduct unbecoming a member” after the convention was over. An immediate and irate reaction, particularly among the large AAL membership, forced Behncke to abandon his vendetta against Proctor. Proctor was a poor candidate for the ALPA presidency in any case, for he was even older than Behncke, and a great many younger AAL pilots were clearly lukewarm about his candidacy. Were it not for the survivors who remember the Proctor challenge, historians today would have no way of knowing it ever happened. Behncke totally eradicated all mention of it from most ALPA records, including The Air Line Pilot.
The big question on everybody’s mind by the late 1940s was Behncke himself. Things were not going well with ALPA: contract negotiations were generally deadlocked everywhere, and ALPA’s administration was suffering from Behncke’s increasingly eccentric paperwork. Behncke seemed unreceptive to new ideas, particularly those of the younger leaders emerging from the local councils.
Something had to be done about the Old Man, but what? In one of those compromises that foreshadowed the end while seeking to avoid it, the 1947 convention mandated changes in ALPA administrative structure, the most important being the new office of executive vice-president. The delegates to the 1947 convention envisioned this new officer as one who would handle ALPA’s day-to-day affairs, relieving Behncke for more general work. In short, the membership was already trying to kick Behncke upstairs to less taxing work, to make him the de facto “president emeritus” as early as 1947.
The 1947 convention, the first one held since 1944, took place at
the Edgewater Beach Hotel in
If any man could be called ALPA’s “kingmaker” during the 1940s,
it would be Vern Peterson. Now 73 and living in
Dave Behncke was still in
full possession of his faculties, he was the same person he had been in the
early days. The problem was that everything else was changing. He always worked
day and night, worked himself to death over details. Later, by the time we had
to relieve him of the ALPA presidency, around 1950 or so, he was much changed, a
different man really, clearly suffering from some sort of mental breakdown.
The big problem, we believed, was simply one of overwork. Our decision to mandate a new officer, the executive vice-president, was prompted mostly by the fact that Behncke needed assistance, there were many things he couldn’t get around to, and he would delay, delay. Things were often on dead center. Our thinking was that if he had a good assistant, he would be able to get things done.
Behncke agreed to the
creation of the office of executive vice-president (he really had no choice),
but he didn’t like it, and he delayed filling the position for over a year. Even
after he selected Sayen, a Braniff copilot, for the office, Behncke continued
pretty much as he had before. So the old problems of tardy paperwork, inadequate
attention to important matters, and excessive concern with minor ones continued
to plague ALPA. And Behncke’s health kept getting worse. In 1949 he was in and
out of the hospital on several occasions.
Vern Patterson recalls, “Sometime around 1950, I saw Behncke after quite a spell. The problems with him had been sort of hard to put your finger on before, but this time his appearance had really changed. He had lost weight from well over 200 pounds to a mere wisp of 150 pounds or so. There was some question as to his physical ability to carry on.”
The frustrations with
Behncke’s failings as a leader were fed by considerable concern among the
membership over technological unemployment. The new, faster aircraft coming
rapidly into service in the late 1940s had reduced the need for pilots. Junior
pilots commonly faced furlough, and the problem was on everybody’s mind. Behncke
was the focus of much exasperation among junior ALPA members, partly because he
seemed incapable of formulating a workable solution and partly because his ideas
seemed totally inadequate, even archaic.
Behncke forced an industrywide deadlock in contract negotiations over what he called the “mileage limitation.” It was reminiscent of the deadlock that brought on the 1946 Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA) strike, but by 1950 the membership was in no mood to endure a strike that would not result in a permanent solution to the problem. Essentially, the proposal measured work loads on all new aircraft against what a pilot could accomplish in the DC-3, which Behncke still insisted (as late as 1951) was the “standard” airliner. If a pilot could fly a DC-3 at 160 miles per hour under the guideline of 85 hours per month established by Decision 83, Behncke reasoned, he could legally fly 13,600 miles per month. Behncke therefore proposed a new negotiating standard for all future ALPA contracts that would contain this mileage limitation regardless of the type of aircraft. A pilot might fly many more passengers in a DC-6 than in a DC-3, but he would not fly them any more miles. This would reduce pilot work loads, reduce technological unemployment, and probably lead to the hiring of more pilots.
There wasn’t a chance in the
world that the airlines would ever agree to the mileage limitation. Many airline
pilots thought the reasoning behind it was faulty, even though it was clear
enough in its direction and would obviously accomplish some of ALPA’s purposes.
Remember, most airline pilots were as committed to the abstract idea of
“progress” as they were to the well-being of their respective airlines. The
mileage-limitation idea was clearly backward looking, and it bothered many
pilots. The jets were already something more than a gleam in the eye of
aircraft manufacturers. What would be the effect of a 13,600-mile-per-month
limitation once these aircraft became a reality? So Behncke got nowhere when he
began proposing mileage limitation during contract negotiations in 1947 and
1948. By 1950, every ALPA contract in the nation had lapsed owing to Behncke’s
dogged determination to include the mileage limitation. Also, for the first time
in the memory of ALPA old-timers, there were rumbles in the local councils that
Behncke was out of his league.
Jerry Wood recalls Behncke’s intransigence as a negotiator:
Dave was inclined to run everything into a deadlock so he could get a presidential emergency board and get it arbitrated. He was also inclined to tell us what we could do and what we couldn’t do. Beginning about 1950 you couldn’t do things that way anymore. You had to negotiate them out. We had trouble with Dave. He was a great one, the right man at the right time, but with the coming of four-engine equipment and complicated work rules, these weren’t things you could leave to arbitration, because chances are, the arbitrator wouldn’t know a damn thing about it. Dave was inclined to want to do things that way.
As ALPA’s contracts with every airline in the nation began to expire, the mileage limitation (or “mileage increase determination,” as Behncke labeled it) was the millstone dragging down everything else. The airlines stood ready to negotiate such issues as gross weight pay, a minimum monthly guarantee, landing pay, deadhead pay, even the long-sought new method of computing copilot pay. TWA’s Director of Flight Operations Frank Busch told Karl Ruppenthal that if Behncke would withdraw his insistence on the mileage limitation, Ruppenthal would “guarantee a new contract in three days.”
It all came to a head on AAL. The AAL pilots, doggedly loyal to Behncke’s line at that point, voted overwhelmingly to strike. On Jan. 13, 1951, acting under terms of the Railway Labor Act to prevent a shutdown (the Korean War was in progress, so a strike was clearly impossible), President Truman appointed an emergency board. David L. Cole served as chairman of the board, and the other members were Frank P. Douglass and Aaron Horvitz, all experienced professional arbitrators. The hearings, which lasted until April 27, 1951, covered excessively complex issues. No agreement between ALPA and AAL emerged during the hearings. While the hearings were in session, things began unraveling for Dave Behncke. A revolution was in the making.
The catalyst in Behncke’s downfall was the ALPA professional staff. Tired of continuous operations at all hours of the night and day with no overtime pay, of Behncke’s bullying, and of being away from their homes for weeks at a time with regular vacations an impossible dream, they decided to form their own union, the ALPA Professional Employees Association. Behncke angrily refused to recognize them, so they planned a strike. But first they approached a group of senior captains. Ted Linnert, dubbed “Fair-and-Square Linnert” by all who knew him, insisted that senior pilots know of the chaotic conditions Behncke was causing before the staff went on strike.
The emergency board was in the midst of its work when the employees met with the committee of senior pilots, which in turn approached Behncke about the professional employees’ grievances. A stormy session followed, during which Behncke insisted that only a couple of “troublemakers” were responsible for the problem. He said that he would sign a contract specifying reasonable working conditions for ALPA employees, but he refused to do so immediately. Instead, he directed Clarence Sayen to handle the problem.
The next day, Dave Behncke suddenly left
Henry Weiss worked closely with Behncke during these emergency board hearings, and he was shocked at Behncke’s behavior:
A group of pilots met with Behncke in my presence and told him “Now look. You’ve got to stop interfering with this board. It’s got to go forward at all costs, because if it breaks down, we will look like idiots in front of the industry and the world.” They urged him to take a leave, because he was sick, physically sick, and he looked it, and was in fact advertising that he was sick. But they said, “This thing has got to go on, even without you! We don’t want to hurt you, we want you to continue as our president, but you have to make a choice—either go on a holiday and let our general counsel (meaning me) and our executive vice-president handle this thing, or else.”
Well, Dave said that he understood, that he would allow Clancy Sayen to handle the board. But they didn’t trust him, and they kept a member of that senior group of pilots there, almost as a guard during the whole board, seeing that Behncke did what he said he would do.
What stands out in my mind
very sharply is that about an hour after that meeting, Dave and I were alone in
his suite and I said, “Dave, I’m sure they meant well by you.” I remember his
gesture. He took the forefinger of his right hand, and ran it across his throat
like a knife. He said, “When this is over, I’ll do it to every single one of
those bastards.”
Somebody had to do something about Dave Behncke now—but who, and how? By the time of the AAL presidential emergency board, concern among ALPA members from many different airlines was strong. Most of it came from men who held office in ALPA and who were consequently aware of the deteriorating situation. Against their will, these men were rapidly becoming revolutionaries—there is no other word for it.
At the time of Behncke’s bizarre breakdown before the AAL emergency board, there were two separate governing bodies in ALPA. When one captain and one copilot from every local council (no matter how small) assembled on command of the national headquarters, they were officially the “convention.” When this constituency voted by mail ballot, it became the “Board of Directors.” In either guise, these individuals were the supreme authority in ALPA. By their very nature, these bodies were incapable of decisive action because there were infrequent meetings and little communication between members and because the vast majority of their members were not in sufficiently intimate contact with affairs outside their own airlines to understand the magnitude of the breakdown at the top.
Only the Executive Board was
capable of decisive action, but its mandate was vague. Consisting of a single
pilot representative from each airline, whether large or small, the Executive
Board was essentially an interim advisory committee. Six tiny airlines with a
handful of pilots could match the representatives of the six largest airlines
representing over 90 percent of ALPA’s membership. The Executive Board was, in
short, a fragile vessel from which to launch a revolution against Behncke, but
it was the only one available. Behncke had generally made little use of the
Executive Board; a few members on it knew each other, and even Jerry Wood, the
ALPA first vice-president (and technically second in command to Behncke), did
not have a list of addresses. (In fact, Behncke once pointedly refused to give
him such a list.) Should concerned ALPA members try to use the Executive Board
to remove Behncke, they would face formidable legal obstacles, for the recall
provision in ALPA’s Constitution and By-Laws was cumbersome, requiring several
steps and much time and expense. Indeed, the Executive Board lacked even
autonomy, since it could not call itself into session. Should Behncke refuse to
call a meeting, the Executive Board could not assemble, no matter how chaotic
the situation became.
Then fate played into the hands of the revolutionaries. Partly
because Behncke thought he had more support on the small airlines than on the
large ones, he announced a meeting of the Executive Board in
When the members of the
Executive Board began assembling at the
Almost immediately after the roll call, the board members insisted on hearing the full story of the ALPA employees’ grievances. Behncke resisted, but was unable to prevent passage of a resolution calling for the creation of a committee to “survey the general management and business affairs of the Association.” The resolution called for the committee to report no later than July 2, and it also permitted the board itself to remain in continuous session until then. The revolutionaries were not going to allow Behncke simply to refuse to call them back into session and thereby defuse the special investigating committee’s findings. Charley Ruby, a member of the board, helped to persuade Behncke that he would have to accept this committee’s existence. Behncke insisted that he be allowed to appoint the committee, but Ruby argued him out of it. The board subsequently named the following pilots to the special investigating committee: Karl Ruppenthal of TWA, Grant LeRoux of PAA, and Sterling Camden of Eastern Air Lines (EAL), a man of such stature and experience with ALPA that his mere presence on the committee would tend to give it legitimacy. As everybody knew Behncke would, he resisted this inquiry every step of the way.
The special investigating
committee had the authority to look into all areas of ALPA’s business, including
one that was rapidly becoming infamous—the new building located at the corner of
55th and
The committee discovered that Behncke had been able to spend
money never appropriated by the convention, because ALPA had no budget. There
was virtually no internal control on expenditures, and
Karl Ruppenthal, who holds a law degree and a Ph.D. and now teaches in a Canadian university, insists that Behncke lost several grievance cases because he spent so much time at the construction site that he forgot to file the cases in time. On one occasion, Ruppenthal declares, Behncke had a stenographer backdate a letter on a TWA grievance deadline that had expired and then threw away the original. He subsequently used the carbon copy to “prove” that the original had been lost in the mail.
The investigating committee explored ways of improving ALPA’s
administration by consulting Dr. A. A. Liveright, director of the Union
Leadership Project at the
By the time the investigating committee finished its work,
Behncke was in
The investigating committee was ready to recommend Behncke’s ouster to the Executive Board when it reconvened on July 12. Behncke countered by mailing to the entire Board of Directors a ballot that would empower him to stop the meeting of the board, which he described as “a group using insidious tactics to march in and take over.” He declared the July 12 meeting of the Executive Board to be illegal, and he threatened a court fight.
If Behncke’s ballot would carry, the ouster movement would surely fail. The revolutionaries organized an intensive campaign to defeat the ballot that would in effect abolish the Executive Board and declare the work of the special investigating committee invalid. They were probably overly worried—Behncke’s “ballot” was 18 pages long, rambling and incoherent, and most ALPA members had clearly had enough of communications of this sort, which they seldom read anyway.
On the morning of July 12, a quorum of 21 Executive Board members assembled. Frank Spencer of AAL, ALPA’s secretary (the first national officer in history who was not a captain), convened the meeting in Behncke’s absence. Spencer’s first action as interim chairman of the board was to hire an attorney, because there were rumors that Behncke would begin immediate legal action against them if they convened. Sure enough, the meeting had only barely begun when Behncke’s lawyer appeared and read a statement declaring them to be an illegal assembly.
Then a bombshell hit—Behncke sent a telegram from
The Executive Board promptly rehired Sayen, Anderson, and Colvin,
and summoned the Board of Directors to meet in convention on July 16, just four
days later. But before the Executive Board could adjourn, new word reached them
from
But for Frank Spencer and the others, the $2-million lawsuit was no laughing matter. It was a frightening sum, and the legal action itself would almost surely tie the principals up in court and cost enormous amounts of money. They were to appear in court the next day. Spencer and the others appeared at the designated hour of the court hearing, but typically, neither Behncke nor his lawyer was there. Just after the judge assigned to the case left, Behncke and his lawyer finally appeared.
Owing to Behncke’s late arrival at the hearing, the court refused
to issue an injunction to block the special meeting of the Board of Directors.
So on July 16, 1951, at the Del Prado Hotel on
There were few dry eyes in the crowded ballroom of the Del Prado (many nondelegate pilots were also there to observe). Karl Ruppenthal remembers Ed Hackett, the labor lawyer Frank Spencer had hired to advise them, saying, “Better watch out, or he’ll have them reelecting the guy.”
Jerry Wood, ALPA first vice-president, presided over the convention:
I flew up on July 15, met with the guys, and got briefed. By this time, I agreed fully that there was no use trying to get the Old Man to capitulate—he wouldn’t even talk a minor compromise. So there was just nothing to do but remove him from office. Whether we could do that legally or not remained to be seen.
The recall went through, and we elected Clancy Sayen and adjourned at 2:00 a.m. By 8:00 a.m. the next morning the newspapers were after us with all kinds of charges and countercharges. It really hit the fan. By the middle of the afternoon everybody had gone home. Clancy and myself and a few others sat there. That’s when we found out that Behncke had filed another suit, tied up all our funds. We didn’t have any money whatsoever. We chipped in $100 apiece to get a mailing out to the membership to tell them what had happened. We didn’t even have any money to pay the hotel bill.
We didn’t know where to go from there.
Where the revolutionaries went from there was to court. On the
advice of Roy Dooley, the
But it was the human drama,
not the legal one, that mattered. Initially, Dave Behncke ignored the
revolution, acting as if nothing had happened. He came to the office every day,
issued orders to the ALPA staff, and sent letters far and wide insisting that he
was still the legal president. When a group of pilots tried to take over the
ALPA offices at
The case of Talton et al.
v. Behncke was filed on July 25, 1951. It requested an injunction to prevent
Behncke from interfering with the changes made at the convention of the Board of
Directors earlier that month. By implication, the suit would legalize the
immediate recall provision that had removed Behncke from office. Of necessity,
the court would declare the revolution against Behncke legal if it should grant
an injunction, illegal if it should refuse. The case wound up being assigned to
Judge Walter LaBuy—a terrible bit of luck. LaBuy was an old friend of Behncke’s
lawyer, Dan Carmel. Judge LaBuy assigned the case to a master in chancery named
Victor LaRue. Under his control and the supervision of a court‑appointed
“supervisor” named Manuel Cowen, ALPA would continue operating for the next
year with two presidents. Both Behncke and Sayen would sign checks, while
Cowen approved all other important transactions, including the completion of
the ALPA building at 55th and
The initial round went to the pilots, when Master in Chancery LaRue found that the revolution had been legal and Behncke was no longer president. It took LaRue until April 1, 1952, to complete his investigation. He issued his report on May 20, 1952. But LaRue’s opinion was merely advisory, directed to Judge LaBuy, who could accept it, reject it, or make changes. Nevertheless, the pilots felt like celebrating, for a federal judge rarely overturned a master in chancery’s work totally.
But Judge LaBuy did just that. On June 25, 1952, he totally reversed LaRue, found exclusively for Behncke, and issued an injunction against the revolutionaries prohibiting them from interfering with Behncke’s control of ALPA. Since the anti-Behncke forces would soon be locked out of ALPA’s headquarters by court order, they quickly ran off copies of the membership list and collected $100 from each pilot they could locate for an “emergency fund.” Its purpose was to wage a last-ditch battle against Judge LaBuy’s ruling and, in the event of failure, to create a new pilot’s association. If Dave Behncke could be stubborn, tough, and dogged, he was about to discover that his opponents could play the same game, even though their attorney was recommending surrender.
In a burst of frantic
activity, the pilots set up the Air Transport Pilots Association (ATPA) and
started collecting “authorization to act” cards. In short order, they had an
overwhelming majority of EAL and PAA pilots, who together accounted for a
substantial percentage of ALPA’s total membership and, owing to their heavy
financial commitment during the ouster, were supplying nearly 40 percent of all
ALPA dues. W. T. “Slim” Babbitt, widely respected for his probity and long
service with ALPA, agreed to head this alternative union. Although Behncke
might win the court battle, he would ultimately wind up presiding over an empty
house. It was a foregone conclusion that a majority of the nation’s airline
pilots would eventually join ATPA.
While they set up the
alternative union, the revolutionaries (most of whom, we must remember, were on
the Board of Directors) pursued further legal action. On the advice of Henry
Weiss, who had stayed out of the scrap so far,
Sayen and Ruppenthal prepared to appeal Judge LaBuy’s injunction. They chose
U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Walter C. Lindley, sitting in
Simultaneously, under emergency conditions, the revolutionaries were plotting other strategies. The easy out was simply to continue ATPA, name Sayen president, and let Behncke have the empty shell of ALPA. But Sayen refused, citing the large number of grievance cases that would be lost by pilots who still depended on him. Sayen would stay till the bitter end, he told Ruppenthal. Only after exhausting the last legal remedies, Sayen insisted, would he surrender ALPA.
Sayen and the Executive Board were pursuing other remedies. Judge LaBuy had ruled in favor of Behncke partly on the grounds that the July convention had illegally adopted the provision permitting immediate recall of ALPA’s president. So, using the list of ALPA members’ addresses that had been spirited away from ALPA headquarters before Behncke had the locks changed, Sayen prepared a recall ballot under the complicated old rules that required a petition signed by 30 percent of the membership to approve a subsequent mail ballot. It would take time, but eventually this approach would garner far more than the minimum necessary to circulate a full ballot. The legality of Sayen’s action, owing to Judge LaBuy’s injunction, was questionable, and he was risking a contempt of court citation by taking any action at all.
Everything depended on Judge Lindley of the court of appeals. Extralegal remedies like ATPA would eventually defeat Behncke, of course, but in the process the whole structure of airline pilot unionization might dissolve. Judge Lindley alone could prevent a catastrophe for the unionization of airline pilots, and he was a Herbert Hoover Republican. Small wonder that Henry Weiss warned Sayen and Ruppenthal not to let their hopes get too high. An appeals court seldom overruled a lower court on cases such as this anyway, Weiss warned.
While Judge Lindley was considering the request of Sayen and the Executive Board for a stay of Judge LaBuy’s injunction, Dave Behncke took formal possession of ALPA’s new headquarters building. In palmier times, Behncke had described the building as “something which will last a thousand years, which will never become obsolete.”
On Thursday, July 31, 1952,
Judge Walter C. Lindley ended Behncke’s career. “I cannot see that either party
can be injured if a restricted stay order should be entered,” the judge said.
This legal circumlocution meant that he was returning ALPA to the status it had
enjoyed under Master in Chancery LaRue, who had found against Behncke. The judge
required Sayen and his petitioners to post a $10,000 bond (supplied by Karl
Ruppenthal of TWA; Breezy Wynne and Roy Dooley of AAL also chipped in money at
various times—only $5,000 was in the emergency fund at the time of Judge
Lindley’s ruling).
The effect on Behncke was negligible. He simply ignored Judge Lindley, remained in possession of ALPA’s new building, and defied anyone to remove him. The Old Man stood utterly alone at this point, with virtually no support among airline pilots and with the weight of the federal courts opposing him.
Whatever affection and respect the pilots had once felt for Behncke were rapidly dissipating amidst the tangle of lawsuits. They moved to have Behncke cited for contempt. Judge Lindley complied, and Behncke was found guilty on Aug. 15, 1952, by a three-judge court.
Sayen had meanwhile gone ahead with plans for the regularly
scheduled convention in October. He was operating ALPA from the
With these mounting difficulties, even Dave Behncke saw the end coming. He now faced a jail term for contempt of court, and in barely a month the 1952 convention would meet. Its legality would be unassailable, and it would certainly not reelect him to another term. So Dave Behncke did what was once unthinkable, probably the hardest thing he ever did in his life. He quit. He was tired, he was sick, and he was beaten.
On Oct. 8, 1952, the Board of Directors convention met on
schedule in the
Behncke lived only another six months. He died of a heart attack after a sauna and massage at a Chicago YMCA in April 1953. At his own request, he was cremated, and his ashes were scattered along his old Omaha–Chicago airmail route.
To this day, most old-timers insist he really died of a broken heart.