CHAPTER 2
Stepping on Toes
They were
called “troublemakers.” Who did they think they were, butting in where they had
no business, presuming to form an “association”? Airline owners weren’t fooled
by the fancy name and the talk about ALPA being “like the American Medical
Association.” They knew the shape and smell of a union, and they were having
none of it in 1931.
“I won’t have any union
man working for me,” said W. A. “Pat” Patterson when he first heard of ALPA.
“Nobody can belong to a union and fly for United!”
It was no idle threat,
as the example of Byron S. “Pop” Warner made clear. Warner (“Mr. A”) got the ax
for ALPA activities on the National Air Transport (NAT) division of United, just
after the convention of “Key Men.” That meeting, held at the Morrison Hotel in
“We were just worn out,”
Wagner explains of the way airline flying was developing as the depression
deepened. “We all wanted to fly, we liked to fly. Everyone in those days was
flying because they liked to fly, not for the money. But we thought we weren’t
getting what we should.”
Of the 24 pilots who
acted as Key Men during the birth of ALPA, only 6 remain. They are old men now,
mostly in their 80s, and the state of their health varies, as does the clarity
of their memories.
Johnny Huber is the only
one who gave up his airline job prior to reaching mandatory retirement, and he
was forced out because of C. R. Smith’s vendetta against ALPA. At 74, Huber is
the junior surviving Key Man, a year younger than Byron Warner, who managed to
land and keep a flying job with American after he was fired from United. Warner
is still alert and articulate, still working regularly as an aeronautical
engineer, still passing his Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) medicals with
ease, and still flying his own lightplane regularly. He is the only one of the
six surviving Key Men who does; the others have had enough flying. Nearly all of
their 18 deceased colleagues died in crashes.
Walter Bullock (“Mr.
C”), born in 1899, flew his last DC-7 trip for Northwest Airlines in 1961. He
collected “pledges,” as the first ALPA recruits were called, on what would
ultimately be Northwest’s Council 1. He is, in effect, the dean of all master
executive council chairmen, although they weren’t called that then. After being
forced into retirement by FAA Administrator Quesada’s age-60 edict, Bullock
remained actively a part of aviation well into his 70s, founding a company in
He quit flying about 10
years ago. “It was time to hang ’em up,” he says, rather wistfully. His logbook
shows 34,000 hours in 102 different aircraft. Now in his eighty-second year,
Walt Bullock is thinner than old photos show him. As the shadows lengthen over
the patio of his
Reuben Wagner is the
picture of radiant health in his eighty-fourth year. He was one of the old Post
Office Air Mail pilots who formed their own association as far back as 1919 and
who later provided a granite base of support for Behncke’s idea of unionization.
To watch “Rube” Wagner enter the crowded grand ballroom at
For Ralph Johnson (“Mr.
Q”) the years haven’t been so kind. Called “Little Ralph” to distinguish him
from the other Ralph Johnson flying for United, he lives quietly in California,
coping as best he can with the debilitating effects of a stroke as he approaches
his eighty-fifth year. He remembers little now, which is a pity since no man
contributed more to the creation of ALPA. Back in 1930, he advocated linking
ALPA to the Railroad Brotherhoods until Dave Behncke won him over to the idea of
affiliating with the American Federation of Labor. After that, Ralph Johnson
became one of Behncke’s rocks, a close friend and confidante.
George Douglass (“Mr.
V”) is also living in
Their wives help them
answer questions they cannot quite hear through the assortment of hearing aids
they carry. Some, like Virginia Huber, remember almost as much about the early
days of ALPA as do their husbands.
Just these six were left
in 1981 as the fiftieth year approached.* (R. Lee Smith of Northwest Airlines,
one of the original movers of ALPA, is still alive, but he did not act as a Key
Man.)
In the memories of these
men the truly important things remain bright. A man’s personality and his
values, the shape of his face, the way he talked and thought and acted half a
century ago, these things they still remember. Principles last forever, but
specific details no longer matter much—who was at a meeting, when it took place.
The shape and course of debates, once passionately contested, seem with the
passage of time unimportant, perhaps even faintly ridiculous.
Every man is his own
historian, extracting from the past that which he finds useful and worthy of
preservation for posterity. What fundamental truths do these survivors still
treasure? What aspect of their experience during the creation of ALPA do they
deem most worthy of passing along to the current generation of airline pilots?
Above all else, ALPA’s
founders want modern airline pilots to know the sense of satisfaction they feel
for having secured their future with their own hands at a time when nearly
everybody, including their fellow pilots, thought it could not be done. A tone
of calm satisfaction pervades the stories these old men tell. To overcome great
obstacles, to participate in an enduring act of creation, to build something
lasting with one’s own sweat, these things are sufficient to maintain the fires
of satisfaction during the winter of any man’s life. And if the price is to
remember being called a troublemaker by those you outwitted, well, that makes it
all the sweeter.
The men who helped Dave
Behncke create ALPA never thought of themselves as troublemakers. They were, in
fact, good “company men,” loyal and conscientious, with more of a stake in the
survival of the airlines for which they worked than the owners themselves had.
As Rube Wagner put it: “We pilots were the company. Some pilots who didn’t want
to join ALPA tried to make believe that if the pilots were for a union, they
weren’t for the company. But ALPA pilots were for the company way ahead of the
company!”
The people who owned
airlines in those days usually had something else going for them. Most of them
had already made it big, thanks to previous success, or birth, or both. The
same couldn’t be said for the first generation of airline pilots. Very few
early pilots took up regular airline flying because they were bored by hanging
around country clubs. Aristocratic celebrity aviators back then, the Howard
Hugheses and Harry Richmans, usually flew somewhere once, perhaps even around
the world, collected their headlines and ticker-tape parades down Broadway, and
then left the day-in, day-out humdrum battles with fog and thunderstorms to
people like Eastern’s Dick Merrill. Showing his good sense, Harry Richman
(actually a professional musician) took Merrill with him when he tackled the
The first generation of
airline pilots, the ones who managed to live through the 1920s against all odds,
saw the future only dimly. Indeed, the nature of their work precluded long-term
planning. Some of them, however, had the idea that air transportation would one
day become something more than a curiosity, perhaps even the dominant mode of
passenger travel, and they had an inkling that those who flew the airliners of
the future would occupy a critical position in the industry.
This foresight was
remarkable considering management’s arrogance in those days, the cocksure belief
of most early airline operators that they were the industry and that pilots were
dime-a-dozen technicians doing a job anybody could do.
The airline operators
were just a bit premature in this judgment. In a few years, airline flying would
become a rather ordinary exercise, still requiring considerable technical skill
but sufficiently routine that almost any young pilot coming out of military
flight school could, with proper training, undertake it. The operators failed
to recognize that the piloting skills necessary for successful scheduled airline
operations in the late 1920s were anything but ordinary. An airline’s success
was heavily dependent upon the skill of pilots who knew intimately the contact
landmarks of their routes, who knew every fence, every mountain pass, every bend
and kink in every river and lake between lighted beacons. They flew contact over
these “lighted airways” in weather modern pilots wouldn’t touch, conditions
sometimes measured in terms of how many telephone poles were visible from a
railroad telegrapher’s office. There are cases on record in which pilots only
narrowly averted head-on collisions with onrushing locomotives.
The first generation of
airline pilots had learned these extraordinary contact flying skills in open
cockpit biplanes flown in every conceivable weather condition, often as
government airmail pilots. When the first multiengine transports became
available, the skills early pilots had honed under circumstances that absolutely
precluded carrying passengers were easily translatable into regular passenger
operations. The ability of these old barnstormers to get a Fokker or Ford
Trimotor through on schedule bred a false confidence among their employers—a
feeling that there really was nothing much to flying an airliner in 1929.
The pilots themselves
knew better, especially the first generation who had not flown the mail but who
were expected to fly single-engine aircraft. Jim Belding, who learned his trade
at the Boeing School of Aeronautics in 1929, managed to win a job on Boeing Air
Transport against the stiff competition of Army Air Corps flying school
graduates. The parting advice Belding’s instructor gave him and Bert Ball prior
to their departure for their first regular airline job was, “Boys, don’t try to
follow Rube Wagner!”
New pilots who tried to
match the record of veterans such as Ham Lee and Rube Wagner usually came to
grief.
The go-getter
businessmen who began taking over aviation in the late 1920s were largely
ignorant of flying skill. Many of them were opportunists who had come into the
business following Lindbergh’s celebrated flight to
Harris M. “Pop” Hanshue,
the operator of Western Air Express, for example, hated airplanes and never
flew, even as a passenger, unless he had no other choice. W. A. “Pat” Patterson
of United was a banker who never so much as touched the controls of an airplane.
Delta’s C. E. Woolman briefly played around with airplanes as a young man, but
he was essentially a promoter who stumbled into airline operations via his
accidental control of a crop-dusting outfit. Even some legendary aviation
personalities, like Eastern’s Eddie Rickenbacker, had only “public relations”
flying experience. Although he carried a great reputation from his combat days
in World War I, Rickenbacker’s total pilot time did not exceed 200 hours, and he
never held a civil license. Juan Trippe of Pan American flew the same way the
notorious E. L. Cord of Century Airlines flew—only when the weather was perfect
and only with an experienced professional pilot along.
Cord had a pivotal role
in the pilots’ growing support for ALPA, because nobody better exemplified the
contempt for pilots that most operators hardly bothered to conceal. Cord had
risen rapidly into the rarefied heights of 1920s-style finance capitalism,
dealing mostly with automotive stocks. In 1929 he acquired his first aircraft
operation, the struggling Stinson Aircraft Corporation, and shortly thereafter
added Lycoming to his stable. Already equipped with engines and airframes, all
Cord needed for an airline was pilots, which he proceeded to hire as the
depression deepened at wages of $150 per month. Cord had no trouble staffing
Century Airlines at that price.
“Any normal person can
handle an airplane,” Cord said in 1930.
Virtually the only
genuine airman among airline executives was Jack Frye of Transcontinental &
Western Air (TWA). Capitalizing on this unique fact, TWA used to advertise
itself as “The Airline Run by Airmen.” All the other airline owner-operators
were pilots in the sense that George T. Baker of National and Paul Braniff were
pilots—fair-weather amateurs.
The hard fact is that by
the late 1920s a clear clash of values had set in between pilots and
management—one that almost amounted to a class conflict. When all the romantic
myths are punctured, the typical airline owner-operator of that era can be seen
as possessing some very unlovely characteristics. He was less interested in
pioneering than he was in his bank account, less interested in the welfare of
his employees than he was in his stockholders’ dividends, and less concerned
with the safety of flight than he was with its profitability.
To the pioneer airline
pilots of the 1920s, men who had flown the airmail for the Post Office, who knew
the ins-and-outs of making a buck with an airplane through barnstorming, it was
profoundly disillusioning to discover the true nature of their new employers.
After the disillusionment wore off, the pilots were just plain mad. It was
pilots, real airmen, who had brought aviation into prominence by the late
1920s—not bankers and Wall Street wheeler-dealers with their fancy connections
and silk suits. To pioneer pilots, flying airplanes was a way of life, something
they did because they loved it. To be in an open cockpit, to smell the seductive
odor of doped wings and oiled machinery, to cast free from earthly restraint
with a water-cooled Liberty’s 12 drumming cylinders up front and a challenging
DH-4 beneath them, that was what aviation was about. It didn’t matter that they
could have earned far more money on the ground selling insurance. Airplanes
mattered—more than life. Certainly more than mere money.
That didn’t mean,
though, that early airline pilots were going to work for peanuts. It was obvious
that the men who signed their paychecks had plenty of money. Aviation was a
gusher that returned unimaginable profits, at least percentage-wise, on the
amount invested.
From the moment the Post
Office proved that an airmail service was feasible, certain well-heeled
gentlemen were using their influence with powerful congressmen to have it
transferred to private contractors. To get some idea of just how lucrative a
government mail contract could be, consider the following example. In 1926, the
year Congress authorized private bidding for mail contracts, one Charles Deeds,
son of a powerfully connected East Coast financier, invested a mere $253 in the
stock of Frederick B. Rentschler’s United Aircraft. The initial stock issue was
closely held, available only to insiders with the right connections. Only three
years later, through repeated splits on the great bull market of the late 1920s,
Deeds’s original $253 investment was worth nearly $36 million—most of it thanks
to government mail payments.
The Post Office pilots
themselves were aware of the financial possibilities. Acting through their
association, they hired former Superintendent of the Air Mail Carl F. Egge to
head a pilot-owned corporation created for the specific purpose of bidding on a
contract.
“Well, we really got in
high gear on that,” Rube Wagner declares. “We went to bankers, mortgaged our
homes. They said, ‘Oh no, that won’t work.’ We couldn’t do a thing about it.”
The message was
clear—only the big boys need apply for a mail contract.
Early airline pilots,
aware that they weren’t getting much money for doing the flying that was earning
desk-bound manipulators fat profits, were highly irritated. They naturally
resented being exploited by people who never flew, who never risked their own
necks. And there were shenanigans going on after 1926 that the pilots found very
distasteful.
“We were carrying little
bolts through for several hundred dollars,” Reuben Wagner recalls. “With a
postage tag on it and everything, and it was fraud, yeah, it was.” The operators
got paid for more than the price of postage stamps, so they made sure there was
plenty of mail.
Walt Bullock had made a
good living for 11 years as a barnstormer. “Sometimes we had hungry winters,”
Bullock recalls, “but we usually did so good we didn’t need to work but half a
year.” But after going to work for Northwest in 1927, Bullock found himself
earning much less. In 1928 Bullock was one of several pilots who approached the
owner of Northwest, a
“He said he’d quit,
disband the airline, if he had any labor trouble,” Bullock remembers.
Northwest’s pilots got a flat salary of $350 per month for five trips a week
between
Following their first
meeting with Lilly, Bullock and the other NWA pilots knew something had to be
done:
That was the main reason the NWA pilots were interested in forming a union. Lilly would say he was rich, didn’t need the airline, that it was just a plaything to him. This was foolish. Even then it was a pretty big airline as airlines went. And this was our whole future, you know, and it didn’t sit so good to have him sit here and tell us it was just a plaything to him.
Were Bullock and his
fellow pilots intimidated by Lilly’s threats to disband the airline and fire
them if he had any labor trouble?
We knew he
wasn’t about to close it up. No, it actually made us more determined, I think,
because we weren’t afraid, we really didn’t believe that. By that time [1928],
it was a pretty big business and it was making 25 percent per year on the
original investment, right through when the only revenue was mostly mail. Mail
used to pay very well, you know. He saw to it that there was plenty of mail. It
wasn’t like a man like Lilly to pass up a profit, believe me. He didn’t get to
be president of that bank by passing up profits.
Rube Wagner confirms
Walt Bullock’s description of airmail profits. “P. G. Johnson bought the best
equipment he could buy,” Wagner says. “He bought the best automobiles and trucks
and everything. In six months, the first six months, they paid everything off.
They paid for the whole thing, and they still were making money.”
Still, only by dint of
repeated pressure could the pilot groups get any pay raises. On NWA, following
the introduction of Ford Trimotors in 1928, Lilly agreed to a small raise. “We
got a whole $25 more a month,” Bullock says. “We all just kept coming in as a
group and we’d haggle.” Lilly wasn’t about to give away anything.
“When ALPA was fully
organized Lilly threatened dire results to anybody who joined. But that never
materialized. We got $775 a month for flying Fords.” Leaning back in his chair,
Walt Bullock’s eyes twinkle, and there is a trace of wonder in his voice.
Behncke, old
Dave, he was a great one for that. I can’t say I liked the guy that much,
personally. He was a hot air kind of guy, but he had a lot of guts and he knew
every politician in the country. Behncke always painted a picture of how rough
it was in those days, and it was rough. But he exaggerated, for a reason I
guess, so people wouldn’t think it was easy to buck bankers like Lilly. Hell,
we’d have been dead without Behncke.
Rube Wagner agrees about
the combination of political and public relations pressures that Behncke brought
to bear. “After the convention of Key Men at the Morrison,” Wagner says, “I
figured my job was gone. Then
Earning a decent salary was one thing; living to spend it was another. While the pilots were fighting for ALPA’s right to exist, a new battle loomed. It was about safety, and the pilots had a word for it—they called it “pushing.”