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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 Chicago on July 27, 1931, was ALPA’s official moment of birth. Reuben Wagner (“Mr. P”), in charge of organizing the Omaha-based pilots of Boeing Air Transport, was one of several very nervous young men who had made that meeting possible. Why did they risk their careers by listening to Dave Behncke?

“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 Lakeville, Minn., to build classic aircraft replicas. He also flew exhibitions at county fairs in a 1911 Bleriot Model 11 monoplane, a throwback to his early days as a barnstormer. Bullock learned to fly at the Curtiss School in Virginia in 1916. In 1918 he flew a 1910 Curtiss Model D pusher from the outfield grass at a Boston Braves Fourth of July doubleheader before thousands of gaping baseball fans.

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 Florida retirement home, he gradually forgets about the tape recorder, which inhibited him at first. With the help of his wife Lillian, and a massive collection of well-thumbed photographs to trigger remembrance, the stories tumble out.

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 Reno’s ornate El Dorado Hotel during a Retired United Pilots Association cocktail hour is to understand the term “legendary.” Mere striplings of 75 approach him as they would royalty, touching his elbow cautiously, eager to share some treasured memory of the days when they served as his copilots on trimotor Boeing 80s. Rube Wagner, of course, was never anybody’s copilot.

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 California retirement. He goes back to the days before W. A. Patterson and P. G. Johnson’s developing monolith swallowed up little Varney Air Transport, his airline, and made it part of United. “The wife and I are pretty much on the sick list these days,” Douglass says good-naturedly. But fortunately, his physical ailments have not affected his memory. George Douglass talks lucidly about men long dead and events long past. The only hindrance to communication is his deafness, a problem he shares with other early birds who spent long hours exposed to unmuffled engine blast in open cockpits.

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. Virginia was working as a stenographer in 1929 when she married Johnny Huber (then a dashing young airmail pilot) and, like Gladys Behncke, she did a lot of note taking and typing for ALPA—all for free.

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 Atlantic. Guess who did the flying.

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 Paris in 1927, their primary goal being to harness the torrent of money unleashed by that epochal event. Wall Streeters called it “The Lindbergh Boom.” There was big money available in the free-wheeling atmosphere of 1927—a choking glut of it, in fact—for anybody who could put together a stock prospectus with the magic word “aero” somewhere in it. The movers and shakers in this scene were usually young men who hoped to make their mark exploiting the commercial possibilities of aviation as the previous generation of entrepreneurs had exploited steamships and rails. They had no real love for aviation otherwise.

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 Minneapolis banker named Lilly, for a raise. Their reception was humiliating.

“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 Chicago and the Twin Cities, with neither hourly limitations nor regular vacations. “The speed of the J-4 Stinsons we flew was only 83½ miles per hour, so that made for some long days,” says Bullock.

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 Roosevelt took over and Patterson changed, he was all for the unions, said that if he were a pilot, the first thing he’d do would be join ALPA.” Wagner slaps his knee and laughs. “We got along fine after that.”

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.”

To Chapter 3

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