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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 Winona, Minn., crash of an NWA [Northwest Airlines] Martin 202. A metal fatigue problem caused a wing to come off. We went to the Martin factory; they were beautiful air­planes, all upholstered and painted. He went into the cabin, and I was be­hind him, and I’ll never forget how he turned around after a long silence and said, ‘Ted, can you imagine the experience of this plane tumbling out of the sky, the way those 50 people felt, and the pilots?’”

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 Washington representative. He was so effective that many early pilots thought he was a better choice than Behncke for the ALPA presidency. Ormsbee was, after all, unemployed, so he wouldn’t have to give up a job as Behncke would. And Ormsbee was extraordinarily sharp. He was the first to suggest, among other things, that the locus of ALPA’s activities in the early 1930s should be Washington, not futile and dangerous strike confrontations spread around the country. He also argued from the very beginning that ALPA should concentrate on se­curing a pilots’ amendment to the Railway Labor Act of 1926. Behncke sub­sequently adopted both of Ormsbee’s ideas, although he delayed much too long in the latter. Ormsbee’s powers of intellection, persuasion, and analysis were formidable. He also had something else going for him, something Behncke couldn’t help but envy—Ormsbee had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in combat during World War I as a naval aviator.

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 Chicago in February. Aside from mandating the new office that would eventually be filled by Behncke’s successor, Clar­ence N. Sayen, the 99 delegates to the 1947 convention also made changes in ALPA’s governance that would be important in Behncke’s ouster. The most important change was the creation of the Executive Board to replace the old Central Executive Council, which had begun as an ad hoc advisory group in the early 1930s and became only slightly more regular as the years passed. The new Executive Board was composed of two representa­tives from each airline, a captain and a copilot. This arrangement proved cumbersome owing to the large number of people involved, so the 1950 convention reduced its size by 50 percent. A single delegate would repre­sent each airline under the 1950 revision, with a captain and a copilot alter­nating each year. (We will discuss the changing status of copilots—who became known as “first officers” owing to the dispute over crew comple­ment with the flight engineers’ union—when we take up Clarence Sayen, who was never more than a copilot.)

If any man could be called ALPA’s “kingmaker” during the 1940s, it would be Vern Peterson. Now 73 and living in Florida retirement, Peterson brings a special perspective to Behncke’s problems in the late 1940s, since he was largely responsible for the changes made at the 1947 convention: 

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 New York, returned to Chicago, and checked into a hospital. He left orders with Sayen to discontinue ALPA participation in the emergency board hearings, canceled all credit ar­rangements at the hotel where ALPA’s dumbfounded employees had been staying, and ordered the staff to return to Chicago. Behncke was, in short, breaking off ALPA’s participation in a major presidential emergency board while it was in full progress, at a time when it would have a major impact on the nation owing to the Korean War. An ad hoc committee of ALPA’s big­gest guns, including First Vice-President Jerry Wood, rushed to New York to straighten out the mess. They were determined that the board was going to proceed with or without Behncke.

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 Chicago on June 12, 1951. (The convention voted by numbers, but the board voted by airline.) The immediate cause of Behncke’s announcement was the presidential emergency board’s finding against ALPA’s position on the mileage limitation in its final report, which appeared on May 25, 1951. “This is an urgent meeting and vital questions will be decided,” Behncke wrote, obvi­ously referring to the possibility of a nationwide strike.

When the members of the Executive Board began assembling at the Sherry Hotel in Chicago, anxious ALPA professional employees sought them out. Most of the board members had no direct knowledge of the staff’s circumstances, its attempt to form a union, or the previous attempt of a group of senior captains to mediate between the staff and Behncke. Several of the board members knew how serious the breakdown at the top was, but they played a close hand, allowing the remaining members to learn for themselves. The ALPA employees were the teachers. Among the 20 pilots who answered the roll call at the board’s session, Karl Ruppenthal of TWA, Charley Barnes and H. B. Anders of United Airlines (UAL), and Paul Ambort of PAA were already convinced that Behncke must go. Gradually, they convinced Elmer Orndorff of Braniff, Jim Hale of West Coast Airlines, and Larry Shapiro of UAL (who was not a regular member, but held a proxy). They planned to focus the board’s attention on ALPA itself, not on the presidential emergency board’s rejection of the mileage limitation that Behncke had called them together to consider.

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 Cicero on the edge of Chicago’s Midway Airport. The idea of an ALPA building had obsessed Behncke for years. The 1947 convention approved $250,000 for it, thus fulfilling Behncke’s dreams. As the committee investigated further, it found that the building itself was one of Behncke’s major problems. Many committee members suspected that Behncke’s sidewalk supervising at the building site caused the lengthy administrative delays in ALPA’s paperwork. Behncke wanted the building to be extraordinary, built to aircraft specifications. His outrageous demands, such as lining up the nuts, bolts, and screws with north and south and recutting expensive marble, ex­ceeded the budget the convention had approved by as much as sevenfold. Behncke wanted the building to be a monument to his leadership. Ironi­cally, it would become more a tomb.

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 Treasurer Bob Strait habitually signed blank checks because his predecessors always had. This was unorthodox, but not criminal—nobody ever accused Behncke of fraud. Rather it was a case of inefficiency, confusion, waste, and most of all an unchecked president so involved with day-to-day construction of his dream building that he had lost contact with reality.

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 University of Chicago. They considered keeping Behncke on as president while removing him as a source of delays and confusion. Liveright pointed out the difficulties of this approach. Nevertheless, the inves­tigating committee couldn’t bring itself to recommend removing Behncke. Instead, it made one last, desperate try to save the Old Man’s pride—it came up with the idea of Behncke as a powerless figurehead, a “president emeritus” who would serve at full salary for life. (Subsequently, the emer­gency convention would vote to double his salary if he would accept the position, but Behncke refused, calling the offer a bribe.)

By the time the investigating committee finished its work, Behncke was in Washington. Grant LeRoux of PAA (who died in 1963 of a heart attack in the cockpit) was the chairman of the committee, so it was his responsibil­ity to let Behncke know its conclusions. Behncke refused to return his calls or answer his letters. Sterling Camden, who died in 1953 of a heart attack while working at ALPA headquarters in Chicago, got the message. Behncke was going to dig in and fight.

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 Washington firing ALPA employees Wally Anderson, Scruggs Colvin, and Executive Vice-President Clarence Sayen, accusing them of conspiracy. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Whenever Sayen had been in the com­pany of individuals complaining about Behncke, he always changed the subject. He was completely loyal to Behncke throughout the investigating committee’s life. “I never heard Sayen say one unkind word about Behncke during the entire time,” Paul Ambort declares.

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 Washington—Behncke was filing suit for $2 mil­lion in damages against Frank Spencer, Clarence Sayen, Larry Shapiro of UAL, and every member of the investigating committee except Dean Bar­nette. “He didn’t sue me because I was just an ignorant little kid from the West Coast,” Barnette laughs.

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 Chicago’s South Lakeshore Drive, the drama of Behncke’s ouster played out. After reviewing the work of the investigating committee, the convention amended the constitution by inserting an immediate recall provision. The roll call vote was 5,562 in favor to 269, with pilots representing over 75 percent of all ALPA members in attendance. Then, acting under provisions of the recall clause they had just inserted, the delegates removed Behncke from office and elected Clar­ence Sayen as his successor. Capt. A. J. “Tony” O’Donnell of PAA gave a moving summary of Behncke’s career and contributions to persuade the dele­gates to continue paying Behncke his full salary for life. They raised it to $15,000 per year, partly as a tribute to O’Donnell’s oratory.

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 Chicago chairman of the AAL pilots, the revolutionaries moved quickly to transfer jurisdiction over the welter of lawsuits to federal courts. Dooley knew that Behncke had powerful political connections and that if his suits wound up in Illinois state courts, the revolutionaries would almost certainly lose. The lawsuit filed against Behncke by Captains Talton, Lafferty, Beatley, Barnes, Ambort, Orndorff, Cochran, and Karlberg was designed to transfer the matter to federal courts, based on the diversity of state citizenship of each of the complainants.

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 63rd Street, he called the police, who showed up in full riot gear. Behncke’s son, David Jr., a tough ex-Marine, acted as his father’s bodyguard, and there were several near fistfights. But Behncke was playing a losing hand, one a more rational man would have folded.

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 Cicero. Under this cumbersome arrangement, the long court battle took place, while Clarence Sayen struggled to carry on a semblance of ALPA’s normal business.

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 Danville, Ill. Lindley was a Republican, appointed to the court by Her­bert Hoover. But Democratic Sen. Scott Lucas, whose law firm was handling the case for the anti-Behncke forces, recommended Lindley, despite their partisan differences.

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 Sherry Hotel, courtesy of the owner, Mrs. Bellows. She knew the revolutionaries could not immediately pay their bills, but she figured, correctly, that they would eventually win and feel grateful, thus generating future convention business for the Sherry. Also, her husband was a successful Chicago lawyer who had no use for Behncke’s legal team of Carmel, Levinson, and Despres.

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 Sherry Hotel. Through an intermediary, Behncke sent word that if the convention would vote to pay him the pension of $7,500 annually that had already been set up some years before, he would resign. Behncke insisted that his wife Gladys also be taken care of, but he would not accept the $15,000 salary for life that the emergency Executive Board and subsequent convention had approved in July 1951. To do so would be an admission that these were legal assemblies, and Behncke would never admit that. Behncke would not accept anything from those “rump” sessions. The 1952 convention agreed to Behncke’s terms. And so it was over—the Behncke era was at an end.

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.

To Chapter 16

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